1607 The first permanent settlement by Europeans in North America is established at Jamestown, in what is now Virginia.
1796, English physician Edward Jenner administered the first vaccination against smallpox to an eight-year-old boy.
1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off from St. Louis, beginning the first overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back.
1897, John Philip Sousa‘s march “Stars And Stripes Forever” was first performed.
1936 singer Bobby Darin was born. He died in 1973.
1948, the independent state of Israel was proclaimed by Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, as British rule in Palestine came to an end.
1955, representatives from eight Communist bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, signed the Warsaw Pact, creating an alliance opposing NATO.
1965, Queen Elizabeth II unveiled a memorial to the late U.S. president John Kennedy on a field at Runnymede, the site west of London where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.
1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young release “Ohio” just 10 days after members of the Ohio National Guard kill four students and wound nine others at Kent State University during an anti-war protest.
1982 Actor Hugh Beaumont (Leave It To Beaver‘s Ward Cleaver) dies at age 73.
1989, Tens of thousands demonstrated for democratic reforms in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on the eve of a visit to the country by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
1993, Eighty-five-year-old newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Jr. died after a heart attack. He was editor-in-chief of Hearst Newspapers and chairman of the executive committee of the Hearst Corporation.
1996, Hall Of Fame NBA player Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers retired for a second and final time. The 36-year-old, HIV-positive Johnson had returned to the Lakers four months earlier, after first retiring in 1991 upon learning he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS.
1996 Actors Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith are married.
1998, the hit NBC sitcom Seinfeld aired its final episode after a nine-year run.
2000, tens of thousands of mothers rallied in Washington, D.C., in the Million Mom March to demand strict control of handguns.
2003 Actor Robert Stack (The Untouchables, Airplane!, Caddyshack II) dies at age 84.