1930 – Betty Boop makes her cartoon debut in Dizzy Dishes.

1854 – Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden.

1990 – Iraq occupies Kuwait and the state is annexed to Iraq. This would lead to the Gulf War shortly afterward.

1974 – President Richard Nixon, in a nationwide television address, announces his resignation from the office of the President of the United States effective noon the next day.

1969 – At a zebra crossing in London, photographer Iain Macmillan takes the photo that becomes the cover of the Beatles album Abbey Road.

1908 – Wilbur Wright makes his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France. It is the Wright Brothers' first public flight.

1576 – The cornerstone for Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory is laid on the island of Hven.

2012 – NASA's Curiosity rover lands on the surface of Mars.

1996 – NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms.

1996 – The Ramones played their farewell concert at The Palace, Los Angeles, CA.

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.

1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

1964 – Prometheus, a bristlecone pine and the world's oldest tree, is cut down.

1945 – World War II: Hiroshima, Japan is devastated when the atomic bomb "Little Boy" is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.

On this day in 1892 Lizzie borden took an axe and gave her father 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her mother 41. Allegedly

1962 – Apartheid in South Africa: Nelson Mandela is jailed. He would not be released until 1990.

1957 – American Bandstand, a show dedicated to the teenage "baby-boomers" by playing the songs and showing popular dances of the time, debuts on the ABC television network.

1958 – The Billboard Hot 100 is published for the first time.

1944 – The Holocaust: A tip from a Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to a sealed-off area in an Amsterdam warehouse, where they find and arrest Jewish diarist Anne Frank, her family, and four others.

1892 – The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden are found murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home.