Today:
1189 – Richard I, better known as Richard the Lionheart, was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey. He would become famous for his role in the Third Crusade.
1650 – Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian army defeated Scottish forces at the Battle of Dunbar. It was one of Cromwell’s most decisive victories during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
1783 – The Treaty of Paris was signed, formally ending the American Revolutionary War. Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States and established its boundaries.
1838 – Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland. Disguised as a sailor and carrying borrowed identification papers, he traveled north and eventually became one of America’s most influential abolitionists.
1939 – Britain and France declared war on Germany following Germany’s invasion of Poland two days earlier, bringing the major European powers into World War II.
1943 – Allied forces invaded mainland Italy during World War II, crossing the Strait of Messina from Sicily and landing in Calabria. On the same day, Italy secretly signed an armistice with the Allies.
1967 – Sweden officially switched from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right. The changeover, known as Dagen H, involved an enormous nationwide transportation and public-education effort.
1976 – NASA’s Viking 2 spacecraft successfully landed on Mars at Utopia Planitia. It returned thousands of photographs and conducted experiments designed in part to search for evidence of microbial life.
1995 – eBay traces its founding to this date, when Pierre Omidyar launched the online auction site AuctionWeb. One of the first items sold was famously a broken laser pointer.
2017 – North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test. Seismic measurements indicated an explosion far larger than its previous tests, and North Korea claimed it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.