Today:
1656: The first Quakers to arrive in America, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, landed in Boston and were subsequently imprisoned and expelled.
1782: British forces evacuated Savannah, Georgia, during the final years of the American Revolution.
1798: The United States Marine Corps was formally re-established by an act of Congress, having been disbanded after the American Revolutionary War.
1804: U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr fatally wounded former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.
1864: Confederate forces, led by General Jubal Early, attempted to invade Washington, D.C., during the American Civil War, but were repelled.
1914: Babe Ruth made his Major League Baseball debut as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.
1921: Former U.S. President William Howard Taft was sworn in as the 10th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the only person to hold both offices.
1960: Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird was first published.
1979: America’s first space station, Skylab, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated over the Indian Ocean and parts of Australia.
1995: The Srebrenica massacre began in Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading to the systematic killing of over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces.