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In 1430 Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her to the English.
In 1533 the marriage of England’s King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon was declared null and void.
In 1707 Carolus Linnaeus, the botanist who created the system for defining genera and species of organisms, was born in Sweden.
In 1788 South Carolina became the eighth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
In 1915 Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in World War I.
In 1928 singer Rosemary Clooney was born in Maysville, Ky.
In 1933 actress Joan Collins was born in London.
In 1934 bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush in Bienville Parish, La.
In 1937 industrialist John D. Rockefeller died in Ormond Beach, Fla.; he was 97.
In 1945 Nazi official Heinrich
Himmler committed suicide while imprisoned in Luneburg, Germany; he was 45.
In 1960 Israel announced it had captured former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. (Eichmann was tried in Israel, found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged in 1962.)
In 1977 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeals of former Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell in connection with their Watergate convictions.
In 1992 the United States and four former Soviet republics signed an agreement in Lisbon to implement the START missile-reduction treaty that had been agreed to by the Soviet Union prior to its dissolution.
In 1995 the nine-story hulk of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was demolished.
In 1997 Iranians elected a moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, over hard-liners in the ruling Muslim clergy.
In 1998
official returns showed two convincing “yes” votes for the Northern Ireland peace accord: a surprisingly strong 71.1 percent in British-linked Northern Ireland, and 94.4 percent in the Republic of Ireland.
In 2002 golfing legend Sam Snead died in Hot Springs, Va.; he was 89.
In 2003, by the narrowest of margins, Congress sent President George W. Bush the third tax cut of his presidency — a $330 billion package of rebates and lower rates for families and new breaks for businesses and investors.
In 2004 a river ferry with about 250 people aboard capsized in eastern Bangladesh during a storm, leaving about 100 dead.
In 2013 President Barack Obama announced new restrictions in the authorization of U.S. drone strikes to kill terrorists.
In 2014 Elliot Rodger, 22, the son of a film director, killed six people before apparently killing himself near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
In 2015 the Republic of Ireland became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage through a popular vote, defying the Roman Catholic Church in a landslide referendum victory to change the constitution of the traditionally conservative island nation.
In 2016 The Transportation Security Administration announced it ousted its head of security operations and put new leadership in charge of screening operations at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport amid concerns about agency mismanagement and airport wait times. Also in 2016 President Barack Obama, during a visit with Vietnam’s president in Hanoi, announced he would lift the embargo of arms sales to that country that had been in effect for half a century.