Today:
1099: Christian soldiers of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem after a difficult siege.
1799: The Rosetta Stone was found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign.
1806: United States Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike began an expedition from Fort Bellefontaine near St. Louis, Missouri, to explore the west.
1815: Napoleon Bonaparte surrendered aboard HMS Bellerophon to the British.
1834: The Spanish Inquisition was officially disbanded after nearly 356 years.
1903: The Ford Motor Company received its first customer order for a two-cylinder Model A automobile.
1918: The Second Battle of the Marne began near the River Marne with a German attack in World War I.
1941: Nazi Germany began the deportation of 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to extermination camps.
1965: The Mariner 4 spacecraft flew by Mars and sent back the first close-up images of its surface.
1971: U.S. President Richard Nixon announced he would visit Communist China in 1972, a major foreign policy shift.