• 1493 - Christopher Columbus goes ashore on an island he first saw the day before. He names it San Juan Bautista (later renamed Puerto Rico).
• 1794 - The United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain sign Jay's Treaty, which attempts to clear up some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.
• 1816 - Warsaw University is established.
• 1847 - The second Canadian railway line, the Montreal and Lachine Railway, is opened.
• 1863 - American Civil War: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the military cemetery dedication ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
• 1881 - A meteorite lands near the village of Großliebenthal, southwest of Odessa, Ukraine.
• 1916 - Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn Pictures (the company later became one of the most successful independent filmmakers).
• 1941 - World War II: Battle between HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran. The two ships sink each other off the coast of Western Australia, with the loss of 645 Australians and about 77 German seamen.
• 1942 - World War II: Battle of Stalingrad - Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR's favor.
• 1944 - World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces the 6th War Loan Drive, aimed at selling $14 billion USD in war bonds to help pay for the war effort.
• 1946 - Afghanistan, Iceland and Sweden join the United Nations.
• 1950 - US General Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes supreme commander of NATO-Europe
• 1955 - National Review publishes its first issue.
• 1959 - Ford Motor Company announces the discontinuation of the unpopular Edsel.
• 1961 - Michael Rockefeller, son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappears in the jungles near Atsj, Papua New Guinea.
• 1967 - The establishment of TVB, the first wireless commercial television station in Hong Kong.
• 1969 - Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum ("Ocean of Storms") and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
• 1969 - Football player Pelé scores his 1,000th goal.
• 1976 - Jaime Ornelas Camacho takes office as the first President of the Regional Government of Madeira, Portugal.
• 1977 - Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he meets with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and speaks before the Knesset in Jerusalem, seeking a permanent peace settlement.
• 1977 - Transportes Aereos Portugueses Boeing 727 crashes in Madeira islands killing 130.
• 1979 - Iran hostage crisis: Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini orders the release of 13 female and black American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran.
• 1984 - A series of explosions at the PEMEX petroleum storage facility at San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico City ignites a major fire and kills about 500 people.
• 1985 - Cold War: In Geneva, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time.
• 1985 - Pennzoil wins a $10.53 billion USD verdict against Texaco, in the largest civil verdict in the history of the United States, stemming from Texaco executing a contract to buy Getty Oil after Pennzoil had entered into an unsigned, yet still binding, buyout contract with Getty.
• 1988 - Serbian communist represent and future Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic publicly declared that Serbia was under attack from Albanian separatism in Kosovo as well as internal treachery within Yugoslavia and foreign conspiracy to destroy Serbia and Yugoslavia.
• 1990 - Pop group Milli Vanilli are stripped of their Grammy Award because the duo didn't sing at all on the Girl You Know It’s True album. Session musicians had provided all the vocals.
• 1994 - In Great Britain, the first National Lottery draw is held. A £1 ticket gave a one-in-14-million chance of correctly guessing the winning six out of 49 numbers.
• 1996 - The case of the Port Arthur massacre comes to trial.
• 1996 - Lt. Gen. Maurice Baril of Canada arrives in Africa to lead a multi-national policing force in Zaire.
• 1997 - In Des Moines, Iowa, Bobbi McCaughey gives birth to septuplets in the second known case where all seven babies were born alive. They would go on to become the first set of septuplets to survive infancy, with all seven alive in 2007.
• 1998 - Lewinsky scandal: The United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee begins impeachment hearings against U.S. President Bill Clinton.
• 1998 - Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of the Artist Without Beard sells at auction for $71.5 million USD.
• 1999 - Shenzhou 1: The People's Republic of China launches its first Shenzhou spacecraft.
• 1999 - In Istanbul, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ends a two-day summit by calling for a political settlement in Chechnya and adopting a Charter for European Security.

Births