- 1597: The first Dutch East India Company ships returned from the
                 Far East.
               - 1619: The first Black slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va.
               - 1741: Alaska was discovered by Danish explorer Vitus Bering.
               - 1781: George Washington began moving his troops south to fight
                 Cornwallis.
               - 1794: Gen. "Mad" Anthony Wayne defeated the Indians at Fallen
                 Timbers, Ohio.
               - 1866: President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War had
                 ended, though fighting had stopped months before.
               - 1882: Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture opened in Moscow.
               - 1914: The German army captured Brussels as the Belgian army
                 retreated to Antwerp.
               - 1940: Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary, was fatally wounded by
                 a Spanish communist with an ice axe in Mexico City, dying the next
                 day. As the Battle of Britain raged, Prime Minister Winston
                 Churchill told parliament, "Never in the field of human conflict
                 was so much owed by so many to so few."
               - 1944: U.S. and British forces destroyed the German Seventh Army at
                 Falaise-Argentan Gap, west of Paris, capturing 50,000 Germans.
               - 1953: The Soviet Union said it had test-detonated a hydrogen bomb.
               - 1961: East Germany began to erect a 5-foot-high wall along the
                 border with the west to replace the barbed wire put up Aug. 13.
               - 1968: Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops crossed the border into
                 Czechoslovakia just before midnight at the start of the invasion
                 to crush the "Prague Spring" reforms.
               - 1974: President Gerald Ford, assuming office after Richard Nixon's
                 resignation, nominated Nelson Rockefeller as his vice-president.
               - 1980: The first successful ascent of Mount Everest by a solo
                 climber was achieved by Italian Reinhold Messner.

               *Happy Birthday*
               ----------------
               - Connie Chung, 52, newscaster/journalist
               - Kingsley Davis, 90, sociologist/demographer, coined terms
                 "population explosion" and "zero population growth"
               - Isaac Hayes, 56, musician
               - Don King, 67, boxing promoter
               - George John Mitchell, 65, former Senate majority leader
               - Robert Plant, 50, singer/songwriter, lead singer of Led Zeppelin
               - Al Roker, 44, TV weatherman
               - Theresa Saldana, 44, actress/author, "The Commish"