1493 — Christopher Columbus left Spain with 17 ships on his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere.
1513 — The Pacific Ocean was discovered by Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa when he crossed the Isthmus of Panama. He named the body of water the South Sea. He was truly just the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.
1690 — One of America’s earliest newspapers published its first and last edition. The “Publik Occurences Both Foreign and Domestik” was published at the London Coffee House in Boston, MA, by Benjamin Harris.
1847 — During the Mexican-American War, US forces led by General Zachary Taylor captured Monterrey, Mexico.
1890 — Mormon President Wilford Woodruff issued a Manifesto in which the practice of polygamy was renounced.
1956 — A transatlantic telephone-cable system began operation between Newfoundland and Scotland.
1957 — 300 US Army troops stood guard as nine black students were escorted to class at Central High School in Little Rock, Arizona. The children had been forced to withdraw two days earlier because of unruly white mobs.
1973 — The three crewmen of Skylab II landed in the Pacific Ocean after being on the US space laboratory for 59 days.
1983 — A Soviet military officer, Stanislav Petrov, averted a potential worldwide nuclear war. He declared a false alarm after a US attack was detected by a Soviet early warning system. It was later discovered the alarms had been set off when the satellite warning system mistakenly interpreted sunlight reflections off clouds as the presence of enemy missiles.
1987 — The booty collected from the Wydah, which sunk off Cape Cod in 1717, was auctioned off for around $400 million.
1990 — The UN Security Council voted to impose an air embargo against Iraq. Cuba was the only dissenting vote.
2012 — China launched its first aircraft carrier.
