Today:
1. 1937: The German airship Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed while attempting to dock with its mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in Manchester Township, New Jersey.
2. 1954: Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in under four minutes, with a time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds.
3. 1960: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which aimed to ensure that all Americans could exercise their right to vote.
4. 1994: Queen Elizabeth II and French President François Mitterrand officially opened the Channel Tunnel, also known as the Eurotunnel, which connects England and France beneath the English Channel.
5. 2001: During a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, astronaut Susan J. Helms became the first woman to command a space mission.
6. 2004: The series finale of the television sitcom “Friends” aired, concluding its ten-season run on NBC.
7. 2013: Three women who had been missing for around a decade—Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight—were rescued from a house in Cleveland, Ohio.
8. 2019: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, welcomed their first child, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, who was born at the Portland Hospital in London, England.
9. 2020: NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the Crew Dragon spacecraft, carrying NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, on a mission to the International Space Station. This marked the first crewed launch from American soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
10. 2021: The United Nations General Assembly elected Maldives’ Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid as its president for its 76th session.