1777: American forces win the Revolutionary War Battle of Bennington, VT.1786: Davy Crockett, the real King of the Wild Frontier, is born.
1792: Maximilien Robespierre presents the petition of the Commune of Paris to the Legislative Assembly, which demanded the formation of a revolutionary tribunal.1807: Robert Fulton's first American steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
1812: During the War of 1812, American General William Hull surrenders Fort Detroit without a fight to the British Army.
1819: Eleven people die and 400 are injured by cavalry charges at the Peterloo Massacre at a public meeting at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, England.
1829: Chang and Eng, a pair of conjoined twins from Siam, arrives in Boston to be exhibited to the Western world. (The term Siamese twins became a common phrase for conjoined twins.)
1841: President John Tyler vetoes a bill which called for the re-establishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members riot outside the White House in the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history.1861: President Abraham Lincoln prohibits the states of the Union from trading with the seceding states of the Confederacy.
1862: The Lakota (Sioux) Dakota War of 1862 begins in Minnesota as Lakota warriors attack white settlements along the Minnesota River.
1862: Major General JEB Stuart is assigned command of all the cavalry of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
1863: In Charleston, South Carolina, Union batteries and ships bombard Confederate-held Fort Sumter.
1888: T.E. Lawrence is born.
1894: George Meany is born. He was a labor leader in the US and is rumored to have been the man behind Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance.
1893: Mae West is born.
1896: Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack and Dawson Charlie discover gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush.1896: Leslie Groves is born. He was the commander of The Manhattan Project.
1882: Samuel Goldwyn is born.1907: Pike Place Market, the longest continuously-running public farmers market in the US, opened in Seattle.
1908: The very first cartoon is projected in Paris, Fantasmagorie realized by Émile Cohl.1913: W. Mark Felt is born. We now know that he was the "Deep Throat" of the Watergate scandal.
1915: Jewish American Leo Frank is lynched for the alleged murder of a 13-year-old girl in Marietta, Georgia.
1920: Charles Bukowski, "The Poet Laureate of Skid Row" is born.
1920: Maureen O'Hara is born. She's been in some of the greatest movies ever made including John Ford's The Long Gray Line and The Quiet Man.
1929: Francis Gary Powers is born.1943: The U.S. Eighth Air Force suffers the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission.
1943: The U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton arrive in Messina, Italy, followed several hours later by the British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery, thus completing the Allied conquest of Sicily.
1943: Robert De Niro is born.
1945: Animal Farm by George Orwell is first published by Fredric Warburg
1946: Martha Coolidge is born. She directed Valley Girl and Real Genius.
1947: The Radcliffe Line, the border between Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan is revealed.
1948: Former State Department official Alger Hiss faces his chief accuser, Whittaker Chambers, during a closed-door meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee in New York. Hiss repeats his denial that he'd ever been a Communist agent.
1958: Belinda Carlisle is born.
1959: Quake Lake is formed by the magnitude 7.5 1959 Yellowstone earthquake near Hebgen Lake in Montana.
1960: Sean Penn is born.
1962: East German border guards kill 18-year-old Peter Fechter as he attempts to cross the Berlin Wall into West Berlin becoming one of the first victims of the wall.
1970: Venera 7 is launched. It will later become the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus).
1980: Azaria Chamberlain disappears, likely taken by a dingo, leading to what was then the most publicized trial in Australian history.
1982: The first Compact Discs are released to the public.
1987: Rudolph Hess, the last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle commits suicide by strangling himself with an electrical cord. He had been the only inmate at Spandau Prison for the last 21 years.
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.
