1897, Carl Elsener patented his Swiss Army Knife.
1917, the family members of the U.S. President began receiving protection from the Secret Service.
1929 Author Anne Frank was born. She dies in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 at age 15.
1939, the National Baseball Hall Of Fame And Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York.
1951 Boston singer Brad Delp was born. He committed suicide in 2007.
1963 Civil rights activist Medgar Evers is shot and killed in Jackson, Mississippi, at age 37.
1964, South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa. He was released 27 years later in 1990, and was elected president in 1994 in South Africa’s first free elections.
1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
1971, President Richard Nixon‘s daughter Tricia and Edward F. Cox were married in the White House Rose Garden.
1981, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, starring Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, opens in theatres.
1987, during a visit to the divided city of Berlin, President Ronald Reagan publicly challenged Soviet leaderMikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
1991, the Chicago Bulls win the first NBA championship in the team’s 25-year history with a 108-101 victory in Game 5 over the Los Angeles Lakers. Most Valuable Player Michael Jordan scores 30 points, and his supporting cast is led by Scottie Pippen with 32 points and John Paxson with 20 points.
1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. O.J. Simpson spent nine months in 1995 being tried for the killings in a Los Angeles court. He was acquitted in October 1995 in a criminal trial, but held liable in a civil action.
1999, Actors Courtney Cox and David Arquette are married.
1999, at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City, Michael Jackson paid more than $1.5 million for the Best Picture Oscar statuette producer David O. Selznick won for Gone With The Wind.
2000, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, said patients cannot use a federal law to sue HMO’s for giving doctors a financial incentive to cut treatment costs.
2002 Billy Joel has a car accident near his home in New York’s Hamptons area. Soon after, he checks himself into the Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, a substance abuse and psychiatric facility, “for a planned 10-day stay to deal with a specific and personal problem that had recently developed.”
2003, Actor Gregory Peck (Moby Dick, On The Beach, The Guns Of Navarone, To Kill A Mockingbird,The Omen, The Boys From Brazil) dies at age 87.