Today:
1619: The first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia.
1794: The Battle of Fallen Timbers, the last major conflict of the Northwest Indian War, was fought between U.S. troops and a confederacy of Native American tribes.
1804: Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to die during the journey, passed away.
1866: President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War over.
1882: Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” debuted in Moscow, Russia.
1920: The National Football League was organized as the American Professional Football Conference in Canton, Ohio.
1940: Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded by an assassin in Mexico City and died the next day.
1968: The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring” liberalization movement.
1975: NASA launched the Viking 1 probe, the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars.
1998: The United States launched cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan.