On this day in 1968, during the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers dispatched on a search-and-destroy mission killed as many as 500 unarmed villagers in the hamlet of My Lai, considered a stronghold of the Viet Cong.
| 1945: | | | U.S. Marines captured the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during World War II. |
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| 1926: | | | American inventor Robert H. Goddard launched the first successful liquid-propellant rocket. |
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| 1921: | | The Treaty of Moscow established friendly relations between the nationalist government of Turkey and the Soviet Union. |
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| 1850: | | | American author Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was published. |
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| 1802: | | | The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York—one of the oldest service academies in the world—was originally founded as a training centre for the U.S. Corps of Engineers. |
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| 1521: | | Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, sailing under the Spanish flag on his circumnavigation of the globe, reached the Philippines, securing the first alliance in the Pacific Islands for Spain. |
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