On this date

1527 — Unpaid troops loyal to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V attacked Rome, forcing Pope Clement VII to flee to safety; some scholars mark the ensuing sack of the city as the end of the Renaissance in Italy. 1757 — During the Seven Years’ War, Prussian troops under King Frederick II forced Austrian soldiers to retreat in the Battle of Prague. (Prussia then lay siege to Prague, but ultimately failed to take the city.) 1889 — The Paris Exposition formally opened, featuring the just-completed Eiffel Tower. 1910 — Britain’s Edwardian era ended with the death of King Edward VII; he was succeeded by George V. 1935 — The Works Progress Administration began operating under an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1941 — Josef Stalin assumed the Soviet premiership, replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov. Comedian Bob Hope did his first USO show before an audience of servicemen as he broadcast his radio program from March Field in Riverside, California. 1942 — During World War II, some 15,000 American and Filipino troops on Corregidor surrendered to Japanese forces. 1954 — Medical student Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile during a track meet in Oxford, England, in 3:59.4. 1968 — French student protesters and police clashed outside the Sorbonne in Paris, resulting in hundreds of arrests and injuries. 1974 — West German Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned after one of his aides was exposed as an East German spy. 1981 — Yale architecture student Maya Lin was named winner of a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 1992 — Former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where Winston Churchill had spoken of the “Iron Curtain”; Gorbachev said the world was still divided, between North and South, rich and poor. 2008 — A Georgia man who killed his live-in girlfriend was executed; he was the first inmate put to death since the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injections.