Today:
1487: The Battle of Stoke Field, the final major engagement of the Wars of the Roses, was fought in England.
1775: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was established. On the same day, George Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.
1858: In his “House Divided” speech in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, accepting the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
1884: The first purpose-built roller coaster, LaMarcus Adna Thompson’s “Switchback Railway,” opened at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York.
1903: The Ford Motor Company was incorporated by Henry Ford and 11 associate investors.
1911: The company that would eventually become IBM was incorporated in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.
1963: Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel in space, aboard the Vostok 6.
1976: The Soweto uprising began in South Africa as thousands of black students protested the mandatory use of Afrikaans in schools.
1999: Thabo Mbeki was inaugurated as the second president of post-apartheid South Africa.
2010: Bhutan became the first country in the world to enact a complete ban on the sale and production of tobacco.