1557: Jacques Cartier, French explorer who claimed what is now Canada for France, dies at 65.

1715: Louis XIV, King of France dies
Louis the Great or the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, the longest reigning monarch of a sovereign country in Europe dies.

1752: Liberty Bell arrives in Philadelphia

1838: William Clark, American explorer, soldier, Indian agent and territorial governor who lead the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06 and claimed the Pacific Northwest for the United States, dies at 68.

1859: A solar superstorm affects electrical telegraph service. (FTB warns that such could very well happen again, and few of us are equipped to live without the comforts of electricity.)

1864: Atlanta falls to Union forces
During the American Civil War, the Confederate hub is captured by Union soldiers led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, in one of the most decisive victories in the conflict.

1875: Edgar Rice Burroughs was born
Burroughs was an American fiction writer who created the jungle hero Tarzan, among others.

1897: The Boston subway opens, becoming the first underground rapid transit system in North America.

1901: Construction begins on NY Stock Exchange

1906: Philadelphia beats the Red Sox 4-1 in 24 innings in Boston in the longest game in AL baseball history; both starters go the distance as A's hurler Jack Coombs overcomes Boston's Joe Harris.

1909: Birth of Hildegard Peplau
Peplau was a nurse educator, created the foundation for modern nursing in her 1952 book, Interpersonal Relations in Nursing, enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps in World War II, served in England and New York and then in the New York Women’s Disturbed Service, president of American Nurses Association, 1970-72.

1914: St Petersburg, Russia changes name to Petrograd

1923: Major earthquake devastates Japan
The Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama are devastated by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake that claim some 140,000 lives.

1923: Rocky Marciano was born
The undefeated American heavyweight champion boxer (1952-56) was born in Brockton, Massachusetts (d. 1969)

1939: Germany invades Poland
German troops invade Poland under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, marking the beginning of World War II.

1945: V-J Day
The formal surrender of Japan aboard USS Missouri marks the end of WW II (US date, 2nd September in Japan)

1952: "The Old Man and the Sea" the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel written by Ernest Hemingway is first published.

1954: Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant opens infamous 10-day football mini camp in Junction, Texas; ordeal achieves legendary status becoming subject of 2001 book 'The Junction Boys' & television movie of the same name.

1962: United Nations announces Earth's population has hit 3 billion

1969: Qaddafi leads coup in Libya
Muammar al-Qaddafi, a 27-year-old Libyan army captain, leads a successful military coup against King Idris I of Libya. (FTB Commentary: The USA/NATO has bombed Libya twice since then, in 1986 and 2011.)

1972: Bobby Fischer reigns!!
American grand master Robert James Fischer becomes the 11th undisputed world champion (1st official American world champion, although Paul Morphy is certainly deserving) by defeating Boris Spassky of the USSR by a score of 12.5-8.5 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

1975: Gunsmoke goes off the air
(FTB suggests that Marshal Dillon had rid Dodge City of all the bad guys, so there was nothing more to show.)

1983: Korean Airlines flight is shot down by Soviet Union 269 people killed, when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 is shot down by a Soviet jet fighter after the airliner entered Soviet airspace.

1985: Wreck of the Titanic is found
The Titanic is found by Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean Louis Michel in a joint U.S. and French expedition. The wreck site is located 963 miles northeast of New York and 453 miles southeast of the Newfoundland coast.

1986: Actress Whoopi Goldberg (30) weds cinematographer David Claessen.

2004: Beslan school siege
An armed gang of Chechen separatist rebels enters a school in southern Russia and takes more than 1,000 people as hostage, demanding withdrawal of Russian troops from the disputed nearby region of Chechnya.