1507 – Geographer Martin Waldseemuller first used name “America”.

1792 – La Marseillaise is composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. It’s kind of like the French national anthem except when they’re singing backup to “Deutschland Uber Alles”.

1847 – The last survivors of the Donner Party are out of the wilderness, with new recipes.

1901 – New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates. “It’s moving! Tax it!”

1915 – World War I: The Battle of Gallipoli begins — The invasion of the Turkish Gallipoli Peninsula by Australian, British, French and New Zealand troops begins with landings at Anzac Cove and Cape Helles. It was a bloody blunder, rife with individual heroism overwritten by strategic stupidity.

1960 – The U.S. Navy submarine USS Triton completes the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe. They did have to poke the conning tower out long enough to off-load a sailor with appendicitis, but the sub never fully surfaced.

1961 – Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.

1975 – As North Vietnamese forces close in on the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, the Australian Embassy is closed and evacuated, almost ten years to the day since the first Australian troop commitment to South Vietnam. We’re getting ready to give peace a chance.

1990 – The Hubble Telescope is deployed into orbit from the Space Shuttle Discovery.