Today:
1807: Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat, later known as the Clermont, began the world’s first commercial steamboat service, traveling from New York City to Albany, New York. 
1877: Billy the Kid, an American outlaw, committed his first known murder in Arizona, shooting and killing a blacksmith named Francis Cahill during a fight.
1915: Jewish-American factory manager Leo Frank was lynched by a mob in Marietta, Georgia, after his death sentence for the murder of a 13-year-old girl was commuted. He was later posthumously pardoned.
1945: The Republic of Indonesia declared its independence from Dutch rule, sparking the Indonesian National Revolution.
1945: George Orwell’s allegorical novella, Animal Farm, was first published in London.
1962: Peter Fechter, a young East German man, was shot and left to bleed to death by border guards while attempting to cross the newly built Berlin Wall.
1970: The Soviet Union launched Venera 7, which would later become the first spacecraft to successfully land on another planet, Venus, and transmit data back to Earth.
1978: The Double Eagle II, a helium-filled balloon, completed the first successful transatlantic balloon flight, landing in a barley field near Paris.
1998: President Bill Clinton became the first sitting US president to testify before a grand jury as the subject of an investigation. Later that evening, he publicly admitted to an improper relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
2008: American swimmer Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal at the Beijing Summer Olympics, breaking the record for the most gold medals won by an athlete in a single Olympic Games.