On this date

404 B.C. — The Peloponnesian War ended as Athens surrendered to Sparta.

1507 — A world map produced by German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller contained the first recorded use of the term “America,” in honor of Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.

1792 — French highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier became the first person to be executed by the guillotine.

1915 — During World War I, Allied soldiers invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war.

1945 — During World War II, U.S. and Soviet forces linked up on the Elbe River, a meeting that dramatized the collapse of Nazi Germany’s defenses. Delegates from some 50 countries gathered in San Francisco to organize the United Nations.

1959 — The St. Lawrence Seaway opened to shipping.

1964 — Vandals sawed off the head of the “Little Mermaid” statue in Copenhagen, Denmark.

1974 — The “Carnation Revolution” took place in Portugal as a bloodless military coup toppled the Estado Novo regime.

1983 — Ten-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, received a reply from Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov to a letter she’d written expressing her concerns about nuclear war; Andropov gave assurances that the Soviet Union did not want war, and invited Samantha to visit his country, a trip she made in July.

1990 — The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in orbit from the space shuttle Discovery. (It was later discovered that the telescope’s primary mirror was flawed, requiring the installation of corrective components to achieve optimal focus.)

1993 — Hundreds of thousands of gay rights activists and their supporters marched in Washington, D.C., demanding equal rights and freedom from discrimination.

2002 — Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of the Grammywinning trio TLC died in an SUV crash in Honduras; she was 30.