2001 Liverpool Airport is renamed John Lennon Airport, in honour of the Beatles musician who was born in the city.
1996 Australia's Northern Territory government approves the world's first euthanasia law.
1992 Physicist Stephen Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time" breaks sales records in the British book market.
1990 The 28th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union opens, a meeting that will determine not only Mikhail Gorbachev's future but also the wider course of Soviet society and the state.
1977 Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-American author of "Lolita", dies.
1976 North and South Vietnam unite following the Vietnam War, forming a single state with Hanoi as its capital, ending a division that had lasted since 1954.
1966 Frank Sinatra reaches number one on the American charts with "Strangers in the Night".
1964 In the United States, President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law, banning racial discrimination.
1961 Renowned American writer Ernest Hemingway dies.
1955 In France, General Charles de Gaulle announces his withdrawal from political life.
1940 German Reich bombers carry out their first daytime raid on London.
1939 Alekos Panagoulis, a hero of the resistance against the colonels' junta in Greece, is born.
1937 American pilot Amelia Earhart and French navigator Fred Noonan disappear during a flight attempting to circumnavigate the globe for the first time along the equator.
1925 Patrice Lumumba, who would become the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is born.
1919 Allied troops are sent to Smyrna and the Pontus region.
1912 Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia form an alliance against the Ottoman Empire.
1905 In France, a new law reduces miners' daily working hours to nine.
1902 Violent uprisings continue in Russia, with workers rising up in Rostov and peasants doing the same across the south.
1884 Alfons Maria Jakob, the German neurologist who identified Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is born.
1877 Hermann Hesse, the German Nobel laureate writer and poet, is born.
1839 The foundation stone is laid for the Othonian University of Athens, later renamed the National and Kapodistrian University.
1839 Fifty-three enslaved Africans led by Joseph Cinqué revolt and seize the merchant ship Amistad, 20 miles off the coast of Cuba.
1777 Vermont becomes the first American state to abolish slavery.
