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In 1533, Pope Clement VII excommunicated England's King Henry VIII.
In 1767, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United
States, was born in Braintree, Massachusetts.
In 1798, the U.S. Marine Corps was created by an act of Congress.
In 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded former Treasury Secretary
Alexander Hamilton in a pistol duel near Weehawken, New Jersey.
In 1864, Confederate forces led by General Jubal Early began an abortive invasion of
Washington, turning back the next day.
In 1934, President Roosevelt became the first chief executive to travel through the Panama
Canal while in office.
In 1952, the Republican National Convention, meeting in Chicago, nominated Dwight D.
Eisenhower for president and Richard M. Nixon for vice president.
In 1955, the U.S. Air Force Academy was dedicated at Lowry Air, Base in Colorado.
In 1977, the Medal of Freedom was awarded posthumously to the
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in a White House ceremony.
In 1978, 216 people were killed when a tanker truck overfilled with propylene gas
exploded on a coastal highway south of Tarragona, Spain.
In 1979, the abandoned U.S. space station "Skylab" made a
spectacular return to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and
showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia.
In 1985, Nolan Ryan of the Houston Astros became the first
pitcher in Major League Baseball to strike out 4,000
batters as he fanned Danny Heep of the New York Mets.
In 1986, an Air Force plane crashed in Sequoia National
Forest in California. Officials revealed little, but experts
speculated the plane was a radar-evading stealth fighter, a plane whose existence had yet to
be officially confirmed.
In 1991, a solar eclipse cast a blanket of darkness
stretching 9,000 miles from Hawaii to South America,
lasting nearly seven minutes in some places.
In 1991, a Nigerian Airways jet carrying Muslim pilgrims crashed at the Jiddah, Saudi
Arabia, international airport, killing all 261 people on board.
In 1995, the United Nations-designated "safe haven" of Srebrenica
fell to Bosnian Serb forces.
In 1995, the United States normalized relations with Vietnam.
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