Today:
963: The Byzantine Empire completes its successful siege of the city of Chandax on the island of Crete, returning the island to Byzantine control.
1489: Catherine Cornaro, the last Queen of Cyprus, is forced to sell her kingdom to the Republic of Venice.
1590: Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots defeat the forces of the Catholic League at the Battle of Ivry during the French Wars of Religion.
1794: Eli Whitney receives a patent for the cotton gin, a device that significantly automated the separation of cottonseed from the short-staple cotton fiber.
1879: Albert Einstein, the physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity, is born in Ulm, Germany.
1883: Karl Marx, the philosopher and revolutionary socialist who wrote The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, passes away in London.
1900: The United States Congress ratifies the Gold Standard Act, which places the nation’s currency on a gold-only standard.
1964: A jury in Dallas finds Jack Ruby guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy.
1991: The Birmingham Six, who were wrongly convicted of the 1974 pub bombings in Birmingham, are released after their convictions are overturned.
2018: Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking dies at the age of 76 in Cambridge, England.