1489 - Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, sold her kingdom to Venice. She was the last of the Lusignan dynasty.
1647 - During the Thirty Years War, France, Sweden, Bavaria and Cologne signed a Treaty of Neutrality.
1864 - Samuel Baker discovered another source of the Nile in East Africa. He named it Lake Albert Nyanza.
1891 - The submarine Monarch laid telephone cable along the bottom of the English Channel to prepare for the first telephone links across the Channel.
1900 - In Holland, Botanist Hugo de Vries rediscovered Mendel's laws of heredity.
1905 - The British House of Commons cited a need to compete with Germany in naval strength.
1936 - Adolf Hitler told a crowd of 300,000 that Germany's only judge is God and itself.
1938 - Germany invaded Austria. A union of Austria and Germany was proclaimed by Adolf Hitler.
1939 - Hungary occupied the Carpatho-Ukraine. Slovakia declared its independence.
1943 - U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to fly in an airplane while in office.
1947 - Moscow announced that 890,532 German POWs were held in the U.S.S.R.
1951 - U.N. forces recaptured Seoul for the second time during the Korean War.
1967 - John F. Kennedy's body was moved from a temporary grave to a permanent one.
1983 - OPEC agreed to cut its oil prices by 15% for the first time in its 23-year history.
1991 - The "Birmingham Six," imprisoned for 16 years for their alleged part in an IRA pub bombing, were set free after a court agreed that the police fabricated evidence.
1995 - American astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to enter space aboard a Russian rocket.
2002 - A Scottish appeals court upheld the conviction of a Libyan intelligence agent for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. A five-judge court ruled unanimously that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was guilty of bringing down the plane over Lockerbie, Scotland.