Today:
1453: The Battle of Castillon, the final battle of the Hundred Years’ War, saw French forces decisively defeat the English.
1791: The Champ de Mars Massacre occurred in Paris, as the French National Guard opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators.
1821: Spain formally ceded Florida to the United States.
1917: Britain’s King George V changed the royal family’s surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor due to anti-German sentiment during World War I.
1918: Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by Bolsheviks.
1936: The Spanish Civil War began with a military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic.
1945: The Potsdam Conference began, bringing together Allied leaders Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin to discuss the post-World War II world.
1955: Disneyland opened its doors for the first time in Anaheim, California.
1975: The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project marked the first joint space mission between the United States and the Soviet Union, with a docking of their respective spacecraft in orbit.
1996: TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island, New York, killing all 230 people on board.