1901: U.S. President William McKinley assassinated.
Republican William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States (1897–1901), was shot this day in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and died eight days later.
| 2000: | | | Tuvalu, a group of nine coral islands in the west-central Pacific with a population of about 10,000, became the 189th member of the United Nations. |
|
| 1991: | | The Soviet Union recognized the independence of the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. |
|
| 1944: | | Germany fired the first long-range V-2 missile at an Allied target during World War II. |
|
| 1914: | | French and British forces launched an offensive against advancing Germans in the First Battle of the Marne during World War I. |
|
| 1860: | | | American social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams, cowinner (with Nicholas Murray Butler) of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931, was born. |
|
| 1792: | | French Revolutionary leader Georges Danton was elected deputy for Paris to the National Convention. |
|