1806: Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, abdicates, thus ending the Holy Roman Empire after over a thousand years. Voltaire pointed out that it was neither holy, Roman or an empire.
1809: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, is born. His most famous poem is The Charge of the Light Brigade.
1819: Norwich University founded in Vermont as the first private military school in the United States. It was founded in Norwich, VT and then moved to Northfield, VT, (after a catastrophic fire in 1866) which causes no end of confusion for tourists.
1862: The Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering damage in a battle with USS Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
1881: Alexander Fleming, inventor of penicillin, is born.
1890: At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair.1890: Cy Young makes his major league debut with the Cleveland Spiders of the National League.
1892: Hoot Gibson, movie cowboy, is born.
1901: Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation.1908: Will Lee is born. He played Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street.
1911: Lucille Ball is born.
1914: Denis Patrick Dowd Jr. enlists in the French Foreign Legion, becoming the first American to fight in World War I.
1917: Robert Mitchum is born.
1923: Henry Sullivan swims the English Channel.1926: Gertrude Ederle becomes first woman to swim across the English Channel.
1926: Harry Houdini performs his greatest feat, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping.
1928: Andy Warhol is born.
1934: Piers Anthony is born.1938: Paul Bartel is born. He was a regular in the later years of American International Pictures and directed the cult black comedy Eating Raoul.
1942: Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands is the first reigning queen to address a joint session of the United States Congress.
1945: Hiroshima is devastated when an atomic bomb, "Little Boy", is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people were killed instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years due to burns and radiation poisoning.
1951: Catherine Hicks is born. She played Kirk's love interest in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
1956: After going bankrupt in 1955, the DuMont Television Network has its final broadcast, a boxing match from St. Nicholas Arena.1964: Prometheus, the world's oldest tree, is cut down.
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into United States law.
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.
