1900 - A small British cavalry force finally relieved the garrison under Colonel Robert Baden-Powell at Mafeking (now Mafikeng) in South Africa after 217 days' siege by Dutch-speaking Boer settlers.
1989 - Hundreds of thousands of protesters fill Tiananmen Square in biggest popular upheaval in China since the Cultural Revolution...
1900 - Joan of Arc canonised.
1975 - Junko Tabei of Japan became the first woman to climb Everest.
1986 - Members of the military junta that led Argentina to defeat in the 1982 Falklands war with Britain were sentenced to between eight and 14 years' imprisonment and stripped of their...
1934 - Karlis Ulmanis seized power in a coup in Latvia.
1940 - Nylon stockings went on sale for the first time in the United States.
1955 - The Vienna Treaty, signed by Britain, France, the United States and Soviet Union, restored Austrian sovereignty.
1957 - Britain dropped its first hydrogen bomb...
1948 - The state of Israel was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion, eight hours before the British mandate in Palestine was to end.
1955 - The Warsaw Pact was signed by the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
1987 - The American film actress Rita Hayworth died....
1961 - Gary Cooper, who won Oscars for his roles in the films "Sergeant York" and "High Noon", died aged 60.
1965 - Israel and West Germany agreed to establish diplomatic relations. Several Arab countries broke ties with West Germany.
1968 - Talks between North Vietnamese and American negotiators began in...
1926 - Jozef Pilsudski led a successful military coup in Poland.
1943 - The German commander in North Africa, General von Arnim, surrendered in World War Two.
2001 - The American singer Perry Como died. His relaxed vocal style endured through six decades with such easy-listening ballads as "Catch a Falling...
1943 - U.S. amphibious forces landed on Attu in the Aleutians, the first American territory to be recaptured from the Japanese.
1949 - Israel admitted to the United Nations.
1981 - Bob Marley, Jamaican-born singer who with his group The Wailers popularised reggae, died of cancer.
1996 - A ValuJet Airlines DC-9...
1904 - Sir Henry Morton Stanley, British-born journalist and African explorer, died. He was famous for his rescue of the Scottish missionary explorer David Livingstone in 1871.
1933 - Nazis, nationalist students and professors in black robes gathered on a square in central Berlin to burn books by Karl Marx,...
1901 - Australia's first parliament opened in Melbourne.
1926 - Americans Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first people to fly over the North Pole.
1927 - Canberra replaced Melbourne as the capital of Australia.
1978 - The body of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was found in the...
1902 - Mount Pelee on Martinique erupted and destroyed the town of St Pierre; more than 30,000 people were killed.
1903 - The French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin died in Tahiti.
1978 - Italian climber Reinhold Messner and Austrian Peter Habeler became the first men to climb Mount Everest without supplementary...
