On this date...

Ty Cobb and Joe Jackson

In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free.

In 1863, Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and 272 of his troops are killed in an assault on Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina. Shaw was commander of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, perhaps the most famous regiment of African American troops during the war.

In 1902, Willis Carrier produced a set of designs for what would become the world’s first modern air-conditioning system.

In 1921, The trial of eight Chicago White Sox players accused of accepting bribes to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series opens in Chicago. All eight are eventually acquitted but banned from baseball for life nonetheless.

In 1927, American baseball player Ty Cobb collected his 4,000th career hit.

In 1940, President Roosevelt is nominated for a 3rd term. The first time in US history a President was nominated for more than 2 terms breaking a long standing tradition of following what President Washington had done.

In 1944, Allied forces captured the French town of Saint-Lô, a vital communications center, during World War II.

In 1945, following Nazi Germany’s surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman signs the Presidential Succession Act. This act revised an older succession act that was passed in 1792 during George Washington’s first term.

In 1947, In a ceremony held at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, General Dwight D. Eisenhower appoints Florence Blanchfield to be a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, making her the first woman in U.S. history to hold permanent military rank.

In 1955, Disneyland had its opening day in Anaheim, California after its $17 million, year-long construction; the park drew a million visitors in its first 10 weeks.

In 1969, After leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car accident for 10 hours.

In 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind.

In 1981, 114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance.

In 1984, James Oliver Huberty opens fire in a crowded McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California, killing 21 people and wounding 19 others with several semi-automatic weapons.

In 1989, the 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer is murdered at her Los Angeles home by Robert John Bardo, a mentally unstable man who had been stalking her. Schaeffer’s death helped lead to the passage in California of legislation aimed at preventing stalking.

In 1995, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, a memoir by Barack Obama, is published. Obama wrote the book before entering politics; 13 years after it was published, he was elected America’s 44th president.

In 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.

In 1999, David Cone of the New York Yankees pitched the 14th perfect game in modern major league baseball history in a game against the Montreal Expos.

In 2013, Detroit submitted a claim for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, the largest such filing for a U.S. city ever; the city officially emerged from bankruptcy the following year.