1788, the United States Constitution went into effect as New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it.
1879, F. W. Woolworth opened his first 5-and-10-cent store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
1893, The first Ferris wheel is shown at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition.
1921, Actress/Playtex Bra spokeswoman Jane Russell was born today. She dies in 2011.
1939, the New York Yankees announced Lou Gehrig‘s retirement, based on the report that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
1940, Richard M. Nixon married Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan.
1945, The Battle of Okinawa ends.
1963, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini was chosen to succeed the late Pope John the 23rd, taking the name Pope Paul the Sixth.
1964, Civil rights workers Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James E. Chaney disappear in Philadelphia, Mississippi during a black voter registration drive. All three are found dead that August.
1982, a jury found John Hinckley, Jr. not guilty by reason of insanity in the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan and the shooting of three other men.
1983, tennis ace Arthur Ashe had double-bypass heart surgery. It was from a blood transfusion during this operation that Ashe is believed to have contracted the HIV virus, which eventually led to his death in 1993.
1985, forensic pathologists announced that skeletal remains exhumed from a graveyard in Brazil were those of Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele.
1985, The movie Cocoon, starring Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, Brian Dennehy, Jack Gilford, Steve Guttenberg, Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Gwen Verdon, Tahnee Welch, andClint Howard, opens.
1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that burning the American flag as a form of political protest is protected by the First Amendment.
1994 American teenager Michael Fay is released from a Singapore prison, where he’d been flogged for vandalism.
1998, actor Macaulay Culkin, of the Home Alone movies, married actress Rachel Miner. Both were 17. They have since divorced.
2001, John Lee Hooker dies at age 81.