Today:
624: The Battle of Badr, the first major military victory for the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslims, takes place in the Hejaz region of Arabia.
1639: Harvard College is named after its first benefactor, clergyman John Harvard, following a vote by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1781: Astronomer William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus while surveying stars in the constellation of Gemini.
1881: Tsar Alexander II of Russia is assassinated in Saint Petersburg when a bomb is thrown at his carriage by members of the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya.
1921: Mongolia, under the leadership of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, declares its independence from China.
1930: The Lowell Observatory announces the discovery of Pluto, which had been found by Clyde Tombaugh the previous month.
1943: German forces begin the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, Poland, as part of the Holocaust.
1950: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover officially introduces the first Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list to help solicit public assistance in capturing dangerous criminals.
1997: Unidentified flying objects, commonly known as the Phoenix Lights, are reported by hundreds of people over the skies of Arizona and Nevada.
2013: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina is elected as the 266th pope of the Catholic Church, taking the name Pope Francis.