Today:
1. 330 – Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) was officially dedicated as the capital of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine I.
2. 868 – The earliest known dated printed book, the Diamond Sutra, was printed in China.
3. 1502 – Christopher Columbus set out on his fourth and final voyage to the New World.
4. 1812 – British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated by John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons, making him the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated.
5. 1858 – Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. state.
6. 1943 – During World War II, U.S. forces invaded Attu Island in the Aleutian Islands in an attempt to expel occupying Japanese forces.
7. 1949 – Siam officially changed its name to Thailand for the second time. The name had been changed back to Siam in 1945.
8. 1960 – Israeli agents captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
9. 1985 – The Bradford City stadium fire occurred during a football match in England, killing 56 people.
10. 1997 – Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer developed by IBM, defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, marking the first time a computer defeated a world champion in a match under standard chess tournament conditions.