1679 – The brigantine Le Griffon, which was commissioned by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is towed to the southern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America.
1714 - Battle of Gangut: First important victory in the RussianNavy.
1782 – George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.
1944 – IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).
1947 – Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day 7,000 km (4,300 mile) journey across the Pacific Ocean proving that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.
1953 – Ohio admitted to the union, retroactive to 1803 (this is disputed by some).
1998 – 1998 U.S. embassy bombings: Bombing of the United States embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya kills 224 people and injures over 4,500.
2005 - The biggest bank robbery in Brazilian history takes place when 150 million Real (equivalent of 52 million Euros) are stolen from a bank in Fortaleza in the northeast of the country.