Today:
1799: Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Ottomans at Aboukir, Egypt.
1814: British and American forces fight to a standoff at Lundy’s Lane, Canada, during the War of 1812.
1861: The Crittenden Resolution, stating that the American Civil War was being fought to preserve the Union and not for slavery, is passed by Congress.
1867: President Andrew Johnson signs an act creating the territory of Wyoming.
1909: Louis Blériot makes the first flight across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air machine.
1943: Benito Mussolini is forced out of office by the King of Italy and is replaced by Pietro Badoglio.
1956: The Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria collides with the MS Stockholm in heavy fog and sinks the next day, killing 51 people.
1978: Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first “test-tube baby” conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF), is born in England.
1984: Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a spacewalk.
2000: Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde supersonic airliner, crashes outside of Paris shortly after takeoff, killing 113 people.