1453: At the Battle of Castillon, during the Hundred Years War, the French utterly defeat the English under the Earl of Shrewsbury, who is killed in battle.
1763: Catherine II, aka Catherine the Great becomes Tsar of Russia when Peter III is murdered. Well, the jury is still out on whether he was murdered or not, but he was definitely an odd duck. He was raised in Prussia, one of Russia's old enemies and hated the Russians a lot. A poor choice for Tsar of Russia, you might be thinking. He made the military switch their uniform colors to Prussian blue, which enraged the miltary. He did several other, frankly baffling things and the current thought is that he might have had a mental handicap.
1791: Members of the French National Guard under the command of General Lafayette open fire on a crowd of unruly Jacobin demonstrators. In relation to the French Revolution, the Jacobins were the real hardliners who helped usher in the Great Terror. Don't get them mixed up with the Jacobites, who wanted to return the Stuarts to the throne of England.1821: Spain cedes Florida to the United States.
1856: The Great Train Wreck of 1856 occurs in Fort Washington, PA killing over 60 people.
1899: James Cagney is born.
1912: Art Linkletter is born.1917: Phyllis Diller is born.
1918: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his entire family are murdered by the Bolsheviks and dumped down an abandoned coal mine.
1935: Donald Sutherland is born.1936: An armed forces rebellion against the recently-elected leftist Popular Front government of Spain kicks off the Spanish Civil War. Many people consider this a dress rehearsal for WWII - early incarnations of terror bombing and Blitzkrieg tactics were used.
1944: The Port Chicago Disaster occurs as two ships laden with ammunition explode in Port Chicago, CA killing 320.
1945: Truman, Stalin and Churchill meet at Potsdam for their final summit of the war.
1950: PJ Soles, actress in the classic Rock & Roll High School, is born.1952: The Hoff, David Hassellhoff is born.
1954: J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, is born. For a sci-fi nerd, I've seen shockingly little of B5.
1965: Alex Winter is born. He is best known for playing Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill & Teds movies, but he also had a great sketch comedy show on MTV for six episodes called The Idiot Box. 1968: Bitty Schram is born. She's the one who cried in baseball in A League of Their Own.
1975: An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft dock with each other in orbit marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.
1981: A pair of walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapse during a dance, killing 114 people.
1996: Off the coast of Long Island, New York, a Paris-bound Boeing 747 carrying TWA flight 800 explodes, killing all 230 on board.
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.
