Today:
1258 – The Mongols, led by Hulagu Khan, seize and sack Baghdad, bringing an end to the Abbasid Caliphate and killing thousands in the city.
1306 – Robert the Bruce murders his rival John Comyn in the church of Greyfriars in Dumfries, Scotland, a pivotal event leading to his eventual coronation as King of Scots.
1763 – The Treaty of Paris is signed, officially ending the Seven Years’ War. France cedes Canada and most of its territories in North America to Britain.
1814 – Napoleon I’s forces defeat the Prussians and Russians at the Battle of Champaubert during the Six Days’ Campaign.
1840 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom marries her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace.
1906 – HMS Dreadnought, a revolutionary British battleship that makes previous naval designs obsolete, is launched.
1942 – The first gold record is presented to Glenn Miller for selling one million copies of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”
1962 – American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is exchanged for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in a high-profile Cold War prisoner swap on the Glienicke Bridge between East and West Berlin.
1996 – The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats chess champion Garry Kasparov in a single game, marking the first time a computer defeats a world champion under tournament conditions.
2021 – NASA’s Perseverance rover performs a crucial maneuver as it approaches Mars, preparing for its landing on the Red Planet later that month.