- The Gettysburg Address speech was delivered. (1863) US President Abraham Lincoln gave the two-minute inspirational speech, which begins with the now famous words "Four score and seven years ago...," at the Soldiers' National Cemetery dedication ceremony.
- The Jay Treaty was signed by the US and Britain. (1794) The treaty resolved unsettled issues from the American Revolutionary War, creating a peace agreement between the US and Britain. The treaty allowed free trade between the countries for a period of 10 years, but it fell apart in 1803. The Treaty of Ghent took its place in 1815, which effectively ended the War of 1812.
- The first summit meeting between US President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took place. (1985) The meeting didn't produce any tangible results, but it established a bond between the two leaders that would lead to later arms-control agreements.
- The Royal Australian Navy experienced its greatest loss of life in its history when the HMAS Sydney and the HSK Kormoran military ships were both sunk in a World War II battle. (1941) On the German HSK Kormoran, 77 seaman were killed, but all 645 crew members on the Australian HMAS Sydney were lost, as well as the ship itself. The war disaster also was the largest Allied loss of a warship with all crew members perishing during World War II. The two shipwrecks weren't definitively located until 2008.
- NASA's Apollo 12 mission put the third and fourth humans on the Moon. (1969) Alan Bean and Pete Conrad were the third and fourth astronauts to walk on the Moon.
- US oil company Pennzoil won the largest civil suit in US history at the time, winning a court case against US oil company Texaco. (1985) The court decided in Pennzoil's favor when the company sued its competitor Texaco for trying to illegally buy out the Getty Oil Company after Pennzoil already had a binding contract to do so. The court awarded Pennzoil damages in excess of $10 billion US Dollars (USD).
- The 6th War Loan Drive was announced. (1944) In order to raise more funds for the war effort, US President Franklin Roosevelt approved the sale of war bonds totalling $14 billion USD. In all, World War II cost the US about $5 trillion USD, when adjusted for inflation.
- The first draw in Britain's National Lottery was held. (1994) The first lottery ticket purchasers had a 1-in-14 million chance of winning the jackpot. Legal lotteries in the US date back to 1934, when the state lottery in Puerto Rico was established; New Hampshire was next, beginning its lottery in 1964.
- Bonnie and Clyde pulled off their first robbery. (1930) The couple's robbery and murder spree lasted four years, until they were killed by policemen in Louisiana on May 23, 1934.
- Pop band Milli Vanilli lost their Grammy Award. (1990) The music duo, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, had won the Best New Artist Grammy earlier that year. As it turned out, however, Pilatus and Morvan were lip-synching — the voices recorded on the winning album weren't actually theirs, and during stage performances they would lip-synch to the recorded music. They first were busted during a live broadcast on MTV, during which the record skipped and repeated a refrain from a song over and over again; the pair tried to fake their way through it, but ended up running off the stage.