1989: Solidarity's victory in the first (somewhat) free parliamentary elections in post-war Poland sparks off a succession of peaceful anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe, leads to the creation of the so-called Contract Sejm and begins the Autumn of Nations.
1989: The Tiananmen Square protests are violently ended in Beijing by the People's Liberation Army, with at least 241 dead.
1982: Four Iranian diplomats were kidnapped in Lebanon after they were stopped at a check point in northern Lebanon by Lebanese Phalange forces. None of them has been seen since.
1961: In the Vienna summit, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sparks the Berlin Crisis by threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and ending American, British and French access to East Berlin.
1944: World War II: Rome falls to the Allies, the first Axis capital to fall.
1944: World War II: A hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captures the German submarine U-505: The first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century.
1939: The Holocaust: The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps.
1916: World War I: Russia opens the Brusilov Offensive with an artillery barrage of Austro-Hungarian lines in Galicia.
1913: Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of King George V's horse at The Derby. She is trampled, never regains consciousness, and dies four days later.
1912: Massachusetts becomes the first state of the United States to set a minimum wage.
1896: Henry Ford completes the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gives it a successful test run.
1784: Élisabeth Thible becomes the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon. Her flight covers four kilometres in 45 minutes, and reached 1,500 metres altitude (estimated).
1783: The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrate their montgolfière (hot air balloon).
1561: The steeple of St Paul's, the medieval cathedral of London, is destroyed in a fire caused by lightning and is never rebuilt.
1411: King Charles VI granted a monopoly for the ripening of Roquefort cheese to the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon as they had been doing for centuries.