| 1783 | French physicist Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier makes the first manned flight in a hot air balloon. |
| 1789 | North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. |
| 1877 | Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph. |
| 1918 | The German High Seas Fleet surrendered to the Allies. |
| 1922 | Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia was sworn in as the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. |
| 1929 | Surrealist painter Salvador Dali had his first exhibit. |
| 1942 | The Alcan Highway, an overland military supply route to the U.S. territory of Alaska, linking Canada and Alaska, was opened. It is now called the Alaska Highway. |
| 1945 | The United Auto Workers staged the first postwar strike at the General Motors plant in Detroit, Michigan. |
| 1953 | The discovery of the Piltdown Man skull by Charles Dawson in Sussex in 1912 was revealed as a hoax. |
| 1964 | New York's Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened. |
| 1967 | President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the air quality act, which allotted money to fight air pollution. |
| 1969 | The Senate voted down the Supreme Court nomination of Clement F. Haynsworth, the first such rejection since 1930. |
| 1973 | President Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate. |
| 1979 | A mob in the Pakistani capital Islamabad burns the US Embassy to the ground in a five-hour attack in which a US marine is killed. |
| 1980 | A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas killed 87 people. |
| 1980 | Approximately 83 million people tuned in to find out "who shot J.R." on the TV show "Dallas." |
| 1985 | Former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard was arrested, accused of spying for Israel. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. |
| 1989 | The proceedings of Britain's House of Commons were televised live for the first time. |
| 1990 | Leaders of NATO and Warsaw Pact member states signed the Charter of Paris and a treaty on conventional forces in Europe, bringing an end to the Cold War. |
| 1991 | The U.N. Security Council chose Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt to be the new secretary-general. |
| 1992 | Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., issued an apology but refused to discuss allegations that he'd made unwelcome sexual advances toward 10 women over the years. |
| 1995 | The Dow Jones industrial average closed above the 5,000 mark for the first time. |
| 1995 | The United States brokers a peace settlement for Bosnia Herzegovina in Dayton, to be enforced by 60,000 NATO troops. |
| 2002 | NATO invited the seven former communist countries into its membership. |
| 2004 | Donald Trump's casino empire filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. |
