1494 - Jamaica discovered by Christopher Columbus; he names it "St Iago".
1715 - Edmund Halley observes total eclipse phenomenon "Baily's Beads".
1810 - Lord Byron swims the Hellespont.
1849 - The May Uprising in Dresden begins - the last of the German revolutions of 1848.
1913 - Raja Harishchandra the first full-length Indian feature film was released, marking the beginning of the Indian film industry.
1945 - Allies arrests German nuclear physics Werner Heisenberg.
1952 - Lieutenant Colonels Joseph O Fletcher and William P Benedict of the United States land a plane at the North Pole.
1956 - A new range of mountains discovered in Antarctica (two over 13,000').
1963 - Martin Luther King Jr delivers his "I have a dream" speech.
1965 - 1st use of satellite TV, Today Show on the Early Bird Satellite.
1971 - Nixon administration arrests 13,000 anti-war protesters in three days.
1978 - The first unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (which would later become known as "spam") is sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.
1986 - Twenty-one people are killed and forty-one are injured after a bomb explodes in an airliner (Flight UL512) at Colombo airport in Sri Lanka.
1997 - Garry Kasparov begins chess match with IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.
1999 - The southwestern portion of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma is devastated by an F5 tornado killing forty-five people, injuring 665, and causing $1 billion in damage. The tornado is one of 66 from the 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak. This is the strongest tornado ever recorded with wind speeds of up to 318 mph.