480 BC Euripides, Greek playwright, was born (d. 406 BC).
1122 Concordat of Worms.
1215 Kublai Khan of the Mongol Empire, was born (d. 1294).
1409 Battle of Kherlen, the second significant victory over Ming China by the Mongols since 1368.
1459 Battle of Blore Heath, the first major battle of the English Wars of the Roses.
1529 The Siege of Vienna began when Suleiman I attacked the city.
1641 The Merchant Royal, carrying a treasure worth over a billion USD, was lost at sea off Land’s End.
1779 American Revolution: a squadron commanded by John Paul Jones on board the USS Bonhomme Richard won the Battle of Flamborough Head, off the coast of England, against two British warships.
1803 Second Anglo-Maratha War: Battle of Assaye between the British East India Company and the Maratha Empire in India.
1821 Tripolitsa, Greece, fell and 30,000 Turks were massacred.
1846 Neptune was discovered by French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier and British astronomer John Couch Adams; then verified by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle.
1857 The Russian warship Lefort capsised and sank during a storm in the Gulf of Finland, killing all 826 aboard.
1861 – Robert Bosch, German engineer and businessman, founded Robert Bosch GmbH, was born (d. 1942).
1868 Grito de Lares (“Lares Revolt”) in Puerto Rico against Spanish rule.
1869 Mary Mallon, also known as Typhoid Mary, first carrier of typhoid, was born (d. 1938).
1880 John Boyd Orr, Scottish physician, Nobel Laureate, was born (d. 1971).
1887 Ngati Tuwharetoa gifted the mountain tops of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu to the Crown.
1889 Nintendo Koppai (Later Nintendo Company, Limited) was founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce and market the playing card game Hanafuda.
1905 Norway and Sweden signed the “Karlstad treaty”, peacefully dissolving the Union between the two countries.
1908 University of Alberta was founded.
1909 The Phantom of the Opera (original title: Le Fantôme de l’Opéra), a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux, was first published as a serialization in Le Gaulois.
1920 Mickey Rooney, American actor, was born.
1922 In Washington D. C., Charles Evans Hughes signed the Hughes-Peynado agreement, that ended the occupation of Dominican Republic by the United States.
1930 Ray Charles, American musician, was born (d. 2004).
1932 The Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd was renamed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
1938 Mobilization of the Czechoslovak army in response to the Munich Crisis.
1939 Henry Blofeld, English cricket commentator, was born.
1941 World War II: The first gas chamber experiments were conducted at Auschwitz.
1942 World War II: First day of the September Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marine Corps forces attacked Imperial Japanese Army units along the Matanikau River.
1943 Julio Iglesias, Spanish singer, was born.
1943 World War II: The so-called Salò Republic, the Italian puppet state of Germany was born.
1944 Eric Bogle, British/Australian singer and songwriter, was born.
1949 Bruce Springsteen, American singer and songwriter, was born.
1952 Richard Nixon made his “Checkers speech“.
1954 Cherie Blair, lawyer and politician, wife of ex-British PM, was born.
1959 Iowa farmer Roswell Garst hosted Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
1959 The MS Princess of Tasmania, Australia’s first passenger roll-on/roll-off diesel ferry, made her maiden voyage across Bass Strait.
1962 The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City opened with the completion of the first building, the Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) home of the New York Philharmonic.
1973 Juan Perón returned to power in Argentina.
1983 Gerrie Coetzee of South Africa became the first African boxing world heavyweight champion.
1983 Gulf Air Flight 771 was bombed, killing all 117 people on board.
1999 NASA announced that it had lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter.
1999 Qantas Flight 1 overran the runway in Bangkok during a storm.
2002 The first public version of the web browser Mozilla Firefox(“Phoenix 0.1″) was released.
2004 Hurricane Jeanne: At least 1,070 in Haiti were reported killed by floods.
2008 Kauhajoki school shooting: Matti Saari killed 10 people before committing suicide.
Sourced from NZ History Online and Wikipedia