1534: Jacques Cartier makes the first European discovery of Prince Edward Island.
1613: The Globe Theater in London burns to the ground.
1644: Charles I of England defeats a Parliamentarian detachment at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge. It is the last battle won by an English King on English soil.
1786: Bishop Alexander Macdonell and over 500 Roman Catholic highlanders leave Scotland to settle in Glengarry County, Ontario.
1858: George Washington Goethals is born. He is the engineer who supervised the construction of the Panama Canal.
1888: The first known recording of classical music is made, as Handel's Israel in Egypt is laid down on an Edison wax cylinder.1915: Ruth Warrick is born. She played Kane's first wife in Citizen Kane.
1919: Slim Pickens is born.
1920: Ray Harryhausen is born. He was a pioneer of stop-motion photography and some of his effects (the skeletons in Clash of the Titans, for example) still look better than anything that can be done with CGI. I watching the 1956 version of Earth vs the Flying Saucers the other day and was thinking, "This movie's kind of dumb, but gosh the effects are cool for 1956!"
1922: France grants Canada one square kilometer at the Vimy Ridge battlefield, for use as a Canadian World War I memorial.
1927: The first test of Wallace Turnbull's controllable pitch propeller.
1930: Robert Evans, film producer, is born. He is known not only for producing such films as The Godfather and Chinatown but also for living an impressively hedonistic lifestyle.
1943: Little Eva, singer of The Locomotion, is born.1944: Gary Busey, actor and lunatic, is born. Here he is messing with the wrong guy in Under Siege.
1947: Richard Lewis, comedian, is born.
1951: Don Rosa is born. He is most famous for illustrating the Donald Duck/Scrooge McDuck comic books. Here's his drawing of Donald Duck's family tree. Hey, it looks like there were some geese in the woodpile. Bet Scrooge McDuck doesn't talk about them.
Click for larger image1956: The Federal Aid Highway Act is signed, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System. Huzzah!
1961: Sharon Lawrence is born. She played an aging-but-attractive cougar on the aborted NBC sitcom Fired Up! and provided the voice of the Superman-obsessed Maxima, Warrior Queen on Superman: TAS. Oh, she's done of bunch of award winning real acting, but that's what I remember her for.
1962: Amanda Donohoe is born. She was in the cult classic Lair of the White Worm and The Madness of King George.
1967: Jayne Mansfield and two friends are killed when their car rams into an unlit, slow-moving truck on a foggy night east of New Orleans. You can actually get pictures of the accident scene, but I think we'll just remember Jayne in happier times. The fella is her husband Mickey Hargitay who played Hercules a couple of times. 
1969: Ilan Mitchell-Smith is born. He played Wyatt in the teen epic Weird Science.1972: The US Supreme Court rules that the death penalty could constitute cruel and unusual punishment. This is the reason why Charles Manson is still alive, as he had been scheduled to ride Old Squirty when the judgment was handed down.
Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.
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