On this day in 1781, Spanish settlers laid claim to what became Los Angeles, now the second most populous U.S. city and the home to Hollywood, whose name is synonymous with the American motion-picture industry.
| 1989: | | The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force launched the last Titan III rocket. |
|
| 1972: | | American swimmer Mark Spitz won his seventh gold medal during the Munich Olympic Games, the first person ever to do so in a single Olympics. |
|
| 1957: | | The Ford Motor Company introduced the Edsel automobile. |
|
| 1908: | | | Novelist and short-story writer Richard Wright, among the first African American writers to protest white treatment of blacks, was born. |
|
| 1870: | | | Napoleon III, who ruled France first as president (1850–52) and then as emperor (1852–70), was deposed and the Third Republic proclaimed. |
|
| 1864: | | John Hunt Morgan, the Confederate guerrilla leader of “Morgan's Raiders,” was killed by Federal troops. |
|
| 925: | | King Athelstan of West Saxony became the first king to rule all of England. |
|