• 1467 - The miraculous image of Our Lady of Good Counsel appears in Genazzano, Italy.
• 1478 - The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de' Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo of Florence.
• 1607 - English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
• 1802 - Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliary gesture with the factions of the Ancien Regime and to eventually consolidate his own rule.
• 1805 - United States Marines captured Derne, Tripoli under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon.
• 1865 - American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina.
• 1865 - Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, President Lincoln's assassin, in Virginia.
• 1925 - Paul von Hindenburg defeats Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election to become the first directly elected head of state of the Weimar Republic.
• 1933 - The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
• 1937 - Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.
• 1945 - World War II: Battle of Bautzen - last successful German tank-offensive of the war and last noteworthy victory of the Wehrmacht.
• 1946 - Father Divine, a controversial religious leader who claims to be God, marries the much-younger Edna Rose Ritchings, a celebrated anniversary in the International Peace Mission movement.
• 1954 - The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.
• 1956 - First container ship left Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas
• 1962 - NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
• 1963 - In Libya, amendments to the constitution transform Libya (United Kingdom of Libya) into one national unity (Kingdom of Libya) and allows for female participation in elections.
• 1964 - Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.
• 1966 - An earthquake of magnitude 7.5 destroys Tashkent.
• 1982 - 57 people are killed by former Korean police officer Woo Bum-kon in a shooting spree in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea.
• 1986 - In Ukraine, a nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, creating the world's worst nuclear disaster.
• 1991 - Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado (see Andover, Kansas Tornado Outbreak).
• 1994 - A China Airlines Airbus A300-600R crashes at Nagoya Airport, Japan killing 264.
• 1994 - Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.
• 2002 - Robert Steinhäuser infiltrates and kills 17 at Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt,Germany before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.
• 2005 - Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country.
• 2007 - Queen's Pier is officially closed by the Hong Kong Government, after a bitter struggle by conservationists, in order to facilitate land reclamation in Hong Kong's Central district

Births