1297 Battle of Stirling Bridge: The Scots defeat the English

1565 The Ottomans abandoned the siege of Malta, as Italo-Spanish reinforcements arrived

1649 Massacre of Drogheda: Cromwell kills 3,000 royalists

1683 Battle of Vienna, Day 1: Christian armies under Poland's King John Sobieski attacks the Turks, to lift the siege of Vienna

1697 Battle of Zenta: Eugene of Savory crushes the Turks

1709 Battle of Malplaquet: Marlborough defeats the French

1773 Benjamin Franklin writes "There never was a good war or a bad peace"

1777 Battle of Brandywine: Americans lose to British

1812 USS 'Constitution' captures and destroys brig 'Lady Warren'

1814 Battle of Plattsburgh/Lake Champlain: Americans defeat the British by land & lake -- the decisive battle of the War of 1812

1842 Mexican troops occupy San Antonio, retiring unmolested several days later

1851 Christiana, Pa: Black citizens help defend fugitive slaves from their "owner," who is killed

1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre: 120 colonists killed by Mormon extremists

1860 The Sardinian Army invades the Papal States

1861 Skirmish at Lewisville, Va

1918 Col. George S. Patton leads the first US tank attack, St. Mihiel, France

1919 Gabriele d'Annunzio's "Legion" captures Fiume

1921 First test of carrier arresting gear, at Hampton Roads.

1926 Anarchist Gino Lucetti throws a bomb at Mussolini's car in the Porta Pia square in Rome, which fizzles; he gets 30 years.

1939 "Former Naval Person" FDR writes an informal letter to First Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill, initiating the most important friendship of the twentieth century

1941 Charles A. Lindbergh charges that "the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration" are trying to force the US into World War II

1941 FDR orders the Navy to "shoot on sight" Axis warships in American waters

1942 Australian forces fall back from Egofi, on the Kokoda Trail

1943 Allied forces secure Salerno

1943 Jewish ghettos of Minsk & Lida, Belorussia, liquidated

1943 Makassar: Japanese minesweeper 'W-16' sinks trying to clear mines.

1944 FDR & Churchill convene the Second Quebec Conference

1944 A US submarine sinks two Japanese prison ships in China Sea, hundreds of Allied troops die.

1944 SGT Walter H. Holzinger & six men from the 2nd Platoon, Troop B, 85th Cavalry Recon Sqn, 5th Armored Div, cross the River Our from Luxembourg to become the first Allied troops to enter Germany

1976 Croatian nationalists plant a bomb in a locker at Grand Central Terminal; 1 dead, c. 30 injured

2001 Islamist terrorists crash two hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, but heroic passengers die retaking a fourth aircraft [See 1565, 1683, and 1697)

2012 Islamist militants attack the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others.