1486: Andrea del Sarto, Italian painter

1602: Mazarin

1642: Benjamin Thompson, 1st native American poet

1794: Scottish critic John Gibson Lockhart. He edited the influential Quarterly Review from 1823 to
1853. He married the daughter of Sir Walter Scott, whose biography he also wrote.

1800: Anglican clergyman Matthew Bridges. In 1848 he converted to Catholicism, under the influence of the Oxford Movement in England. He is remembered today for authoring the hymn, 'Crown Him with Many Crowns.'

1858: British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst

1862: Austrian Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt

1895: British literary critic F.R. Leavis.

1903: Irving Stone, the middlebrow author of fictional biographies of figures such as Michaelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and Van Gogh (Lust for Life)

1904: Isaac Bashevis Singer in Radzymin, Poland. He wrote in Yiddish and English. He held American citizenship when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.

1910: Animator William Hanna

1910: Actress Gloria Stuart

1912: Folk singer Woody Guthrie

1913: Gerald Ford, 38th president of the United States (born Leslie King, but when his mother divorced King and married Gerald Ford, the boy's name was changed). He was the first President to serve without having been chosen in a National Election.

1918: Jay Wright Forrester, invented random-access magnetic core memory.

1918: Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman

1923: Actor Dale Robertson

1926: Actor Harry Dean Stanton

1928: Actress Nancy Olson

1930: Actress Polly Bergen (born Nellie Paulina Burgin)

1932: Former football player Rosey Grier

1933: Country singer Del Reeves

1952: Actor Jerry Houser

1952: Actor-director Eric Laneuville

1958: Movie producer Scott Rudin ("The Truman Show")

1961: Actor Jackie Earle Haley

1966: Actor Matthew Fox

1966: Rock singer-musician Tonya Donelly (Belly)

1970: Actress Missy Gold

1975: Rhythm-and-blues singer Tameka Cottle (Xscape) 

1975: Hip-hop musician taboo (Black Eyed Peas)

0664: Death of Deusdedit, 6th Archbishop of Canterbury

0664: Death of Erconberct, King of Kent

1093: Death of St. Ulric of Zell

1099: Mining begins under the walls of Jerusalem (1st Crusade)

1187: Nablus falls to Saladin

1223: Death of King Philip II "Augustus" of France

1254: Death of Theobald IV, King of Navarre

1274: Philosopher, theologian, and mystic Bonaventura (born Giovanni Fidanza) dies.

1291: The Castle of the Sea (Sidon) falls to the Mameluks

1404: Treaty between Owain Glyn Dwr and France against England

1531: King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon parted for the last time

1536: Treaty of Lyons

1570: Reformed missal went into use in Roman Catholic churches

1614: Death of St. Camillus

1629: Pacification of Nimes

1634: Charles I, King of England, and his wife enter Oxford

1773: The first annual conference of the Methodist Church in America convened at St.George's Church in Philadelphia, PA.

1642: Empress Myosho of Japan moves into her new palace in Kyoto

1789: During the French Revolution, citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison and released the seven prisoners inside.

1789: Mozart wrote a letter to his Baron Michael von Puchberg, reporting that he was in serious financial trouble because of illness and asking for a loan. He apologized for being "obliged to beg so shamelessly from my friend." The baron lent him the equivalent of several thousand dollars.

1798: Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writing about the United States government.

1833: Anglican clergyman John Keble preached his famous sermon on national religious apostasy. It marked the beginning of the Oxford Movement, which sought to purify and revitalize the Church of England.

1850: The first public demonstration of ice made by refrigeration.

1853: Commodore Matthew Perry relayed to Japanese officials a letter from former President Fillmore, requesting trade relations.

1865: The first ascent of the Matterhorn.

1867: Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite.

1868: The patent for a tape measure was issued to A.J. Fellowes of New Haven, Connecticut.

1881: Outlaw William H. Bonney Junior, alias "Billy the Kid," was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

1888: The first American record company, North American Phonograph, was founded by a Pittsburgh businessman named Jesse Lippincott. This was more than thirty years before Pittsburgh would have the added distinction of hearing the first radio station K-D-K-A.

1892: The Baptist Young People's Union held its first national convention in Detroit. The founding of the BYP Union was inspired by the earlier work of Francis E. Clark, a Congregational pastor who founded the first 'modern' youth fellowship in 1881.

1914: Robert Goddard was granted the first patent for a liquid-fueled rocket design.

1917: Three months after the declaration of war, the first American casualty of World War I was sustained at Arras, France.

1919: Chouchou Debussy died of diphtheria at the age of fourteen. Chouchou was Debussy's only child and the inspiration for his suite "The Children's Corner," which includes "Golliwog's Cakewalk."

1933: All political parties, except the Nazis, were officially suppressed in Germany.

1951: The George Washington Carver National Monument was dedicated in Diamond, MO.

1958: The army of Iraq overthrew the monarchy.

1965: The American space probe "Mariner Four" flew by Mars, sending back photographs of the planet.

1965: US Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson Junior, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, died in London at age 65.

1966: Eight student nurses were murdered by Richard Speck in a Chicago dormitory. (Speck died in prison in 1991, a day short of his 50th birthday.)

1976: Jimmy Carter won the Democratic presidential nomination by an overwhelming margin at the party's convention in New York.

1978: Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky was convicted of treasonous espionage and anti-Soviet agitation, and sentenced to 13 years at hard labor. (Shcharansky was released in 1986.)

1981: The All-Star Game was postponed because of a 33-day-old baseball players strike. Still, some 15,000 fans showed up to boo the players and to see an imaginary game. The 52nd All-Star classic was not held until August 9.

1984: New Zealand's Labor Party, led by David Lange, won a landslide election victory, ending conservative Prime Minister Robert Muldoon's nine-year tenure.

1985: Doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital said President Reagan was making a spectacular recovery from major abdominal surgery to remove an intestinal growth that proved to be cancerous.

1986: A federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced former FBI agent Richard W. Miller to two life terms plus 50 years in prison for spying for the Soviet Union.

1987: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North concluded six days of testimony before the Iran-Contra committees.

1987: The National League took 13 innings to defeat the American League, 2-to-0, in the 58th All-Star Game in Oakland, California.

1988: Speaking before the UN Security Council, Iran's foreign minister, Ali-Akbar Velayati, denounced the US downing of an Iranian jetliner as "a barbaric massacre." Vice President Bush replied that the USS "Vincennes" had fired in self-defense.

1989: Leaders of the seven richest nations opened a summit in Paris, which was also celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution with pomp and pageantry.

1990: West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived in Moscow for talks with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that were aimed at soothing Kremlin concerns about German unification.

1991: American and Soviet negotiators in Washington continued work on trying to complete a treaty slashing long-range nuclear arsenals.

1991: leaders of the group of Seven nations began gathering in London for their annual economic summit.

1991: Syrian President Hafez al-Assad accepted President Bush's compromise proposal for a Middle East peace conference.

1992: The second day of the Democratic national convention heard from speakers who included former President Carter, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and AIDS activist Elisabeth Glaser.

1992: The American League won the All-Star game, defeating the National League team 13-to-6 at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego.

1993: President Clinton visited flood-stricken Iowa for the second time in ten days, telling flood victims to "hang in there."

1994: Scores of Hutu refugees from Rwanda's civil war flooded across the border into Zaire, swamping relief organizations.

1995: Under pressure from Congress, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh removed his friend Larry Potts as the bureau's deputy director because of controversy over Pott's role in a deadly 1992 FBI siege in Idaho.

1996: Fire crews were battling blazes covering more than 16-thousand acres in California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon and Utah.

1996: Northern Ireland, a car bomb ravaged a country hotel soon after the building was evacuated. (A shadow group calling itself "Continuity" claimed responsibility for the blast.)

1997: The international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced Dusan Tadic, a Bosnian Serb, to 20 years in prison for turning on his Muslim and Croat neighbors in a deadly campaign of terror and torture.

1997: O.J. Simpson's California mansion was auctioned off for $2.6 million dollars.

1998: The city of Los Angeles sued 15 tobacco companies for $2.5 billion over the dangers of secondhand smoke. 

1999: Iranian hard-liners answered a week of pro-democracy rallies with one of their own, sending 100,000 people into the streets of Tehran.

1999: Major league umpires voted to resign Sept. 2 and not work the final month of the season (the strategy collapsed, with baseball owners accepting the resignations of 22 umpires).

1999: Race-based school busing in Boston ended after 25 years.

2000: A Florida jury ordered five major tobacco companies to pay smokers a record $145 billion in punitive damages. 

2000: The 13th International AIDS Conference came to a close in Durban, South Africa. 

2000: Actress Meredith MacRae of TV's "Petticoat Junction" died in Manhattan Beach, California, at age 56.