1541: A Portuguese ship drifts ashore in the ancient Japanese province of Higo (modern day Kumamoto Prefecture).
1572: Huguenot King Henry IV of Navarre marries Marguerite de Valois in Paris, in an attempt to reconcile Protestants and Catholics.
1587: Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Gov. John White of the Colony of Roanoke, becomes the first English child born in the Americas.
1590: John White, the governor of the Colony of Roanoke, returns from a supply-trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.
1775: The Spanish establish a fort at what would be known as Tucson, Arizona.
1750: Antonio Salieri, Italian composer, is born. There is little evidence to support his depiction as a raving lunatic in Amadeus.
1868: French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen discovers helium.1909: Tokyo mayor Yukio Ozaki presents Washington, D.C. with 2,000 cherry trees, which President Taft decides to plant near the Potomac River.
1917: A Great Fire in Thessaloniki, Greece destroys 32% of the city leaving 70,000 individuals homeless.1920: The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage.
1920: Shelley Winters is born.
1933: Roman Polanski is born.
1934: Vincent Bugliosi is born. He was the prosecutor for the Tate/LaBianca killings and his book about the Manson Family Helter Skelter brought the True Crime genre into respectability.
1936: Robert Redford is born.
1938: The Thousand Islands Bridge, connecting New York State with Ontario over the St. Lawrence River, is dedicated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1941: Adolf Hitler orders a temporary halt to Nazi Germany's systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and handicapped due to protests.1943: Martin Mull is born.
1952: Patrick Swayze is born.
1957: Denis Leary is born.
1958: Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita is published in the United States.
1963: James Meredith becomes the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi.
1965: United States Marines destroy a Viet Cong stronghold on the Van Tuong peninsula in the first major American ground battle of the war.1969: Jimi Hendrix plays the unofficial last day of Woodstock.
1969: Christian Slater is born.
1977: Steve Biko was arrested at a police roadblock under the Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967 in King William's Town, South Africa. He would later die of the injuries sustained during this arrest bringing attention to apartheid.
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.
