On this date...

Yosemite Valley

In 1794, The Siege of Fort Recovery in Ohio saw an American Army fend off an attack by an Indian Confederacy

In 1805, the Michigan Territory was organized

In 1835, Indian Territory was created by the US Congress. It was located in what is now present day Oklahoma.

In 1859, Jean-François Gravelet, known as Blondin, crossed the Niagara Falls on a tightrope that was 335 metres (1,100 feet) long and 49 metres (160 feet) above the water.

In 1862, The Battle of Glendale was fought in Virginia as part of the Seven Days Battles during the Civil War.

In 1863, Battles occurred in Hanover, Pennsylvania and at Sporting Hill, Pennsylvania during the Civil War.

In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act, Senate Bill 203. The legislation gave California the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”

In 1876, After a slow two-day march, the wounded soldiers from the Battle of the Little Big Horn reach the steamboat Far West.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper setting out his theory of relativity that has since reshaped modern physics.

In 1906, US Congress passes the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act; these laws owe much to the expose journalism of the period specifically, Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle.'

In 1918, labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was arrested in Cleveland, charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for a speech he’d made two weeks earlier denouncing U.S. involvement in World War I. (Debs was sentenced to prison and disenfranchised for life.)

In 1921, President Warren G. Harding nominated former President William Howard Taft to be chief justice of the United States, succeeding the late Edward Douglass White.

In 1936, American author Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind, a sweeping romance set during the Civil War; the novel later won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a hugely successful film.

In 1943 Allied forces under General MacArthur begin Operation Cartwheel (island-hopping) in the South West Pacific to try to destroy Japanese base at Rabaul

In 1953, workers at a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, watch as the first completed Corvette, a two-seater sports car that would become an American icon, rolls off the assembly line. It was one of just 300 Corvettes made that year.

In 1958, the U.S. Senate passed the Alaska statehood bill by a vote of 64-20.

In 1966, The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded with the mission of promoting equal rights for women; Betty Friedan served as its first president.

In 1967 Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. named 1st black astronaut

In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the government could not prevent The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers.

In 1971, The 26th Amendment to the Constitution, lowering the minimum voting age to 18, was ratified as Ohio became the 38th state to approve it.

In 1985, In 1985, 39 American hostages from a hijacked TWA jetliner were freed in Beirut after being held 17 days.

In 1986, In Bowers v. Hardwick, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (5–4) that states could criminalize gay sex between consenting adults; the decision was overturned by Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.

In 1994, the U.S. Figure Skating Association stripped Tonya Harding of the national championship and banned her for life for her role in the attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan.

In 2009, American soldier Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl went missing from his base in eastern Afghanistan, and was later confirmed to have been captured by insurgents after walking away from his post. Bergdahl was later released on May 31, 2014 in exchange for five Taliban detainees; he pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, but was spared a prison sentence by a military judge.

In 2019, While at the DMZ, President Donald Trump walked into North Korea to greet its leader, Kim Jong-Un, thus becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit that country.

In 2020, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed a landmark bill retiring the last state flag bearing the Confederate battle emblem.

In 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.