1227 – Gąsawa massacre: At an assembly of Piast dukes at Gąsawa, Polish Prince Leszek the White, Duke Henry the Bearded and others are attacked by assassins while bathing.
1248 – An overnight landslide on the north side of Mont Granier, one of the largest historical rockslope failures ever recorded in Europe, destroys five villages.
1359 – Peter I of Cyprus ascends the throne of Cyprus after his father, Hugh IV of Cyprus, abdicates.
1429 – Hundred Years' War: Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieges La Charité.
1542 – Battle of Solway Moss: An English army defeats a much larger Scottish force near the River Esk in Dumfries and Galloway.
1642 – Abel Tasman becomes the first European to discover the island Van Diemen's Land (later renamed Tasmania).
1750 – Tarabai, regent of the Maratha Empire, imprisons Rajaram II for refusing to remove Balaji Baji Rao from the post of peshwa.
1835 – The Texas Provincial Government authorizes the creation of a horse-mounted police force called the Texas Rangers (which is now the Texas Ranger Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety).
1850 – Danish troops defeat a Schleswig-Holstein force in the town of Lottorf, Schleswig-Holstein.
1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
1877 – Anna Sewell's animal welfare novel Black Beauty is published.
1906 – A 13–6 victory by the Massillon Tigers over their rivals, the Canton Bulldogs, for the "Ohio League" Championship, leads to accusations that the championship series was fixed and results in the first major scandal in professional American football.
1917 – In Milwaukee, nine members of the Milwaukee Police Department are killed by a bomb, the most deaths in a single event in U.S. police history until the September 11 attacks in 2001.
1932 – In Washington, D.C., the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (better known as the FBI Crime Lab) officially opens.
1935 – The Senegalese Socialist Party holds its second congress.
1962 – The influential British satirical television programme That Was the Week That Was is first broadcast.
1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is killed by Jack Ruby.
1965 – Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seizes power in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and becomes President; he rules the country (which he renames Zaire in 1971) for over 30 years, until being overthrown by rebels in 1997.
1966 – Bulgarian TABSO Flight 101 crashes near Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, killing all 82 people on board.
1969 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 command module splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to land on the Moon.
1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.
1973 – A national speed limit is imposed on the Autobahn in Germany because of the 1973 oil crisis. The speed limit lasts only four months.
1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed "Lucy" (after The Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.
1976 – The Çaldıran–Muradiye earthquake in eastern Turkey kills between 4,000 and 5,000 people.
1992 – China Southern Airlines Flight 3943 crashes on approach to Guilin Qifengling Airport in Guilin, China, killing all 141 people on board.
2012 – A fire at a clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, kills at least 112 people.
2015 – A Russian Air Force Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet is shot down by the Turkish Air Force over the Syria–Turkey border, killing one of the two pilots; a Russian marine is also killed during a subsequent rescue effort.
2015 – A terrorist attack on a hotel in Al-Arish, Egypt, kills at least seven people and injures 12 others.
2015 – An explosion on a bus carrying Tunisian Presidential Guard personnel in Tunisia's capital Tunis leaves at least 14 people dead.
