- 1868 – Thomas Edison filed papers for his first invention: an electrical vote recorder to rapidly tabulate floor votes in Congress. Members of Congress rejected the apparatus and it was never used.
- 1890 – The Daughters of the American Revolution is founded.
- 1906 – The San Francisco public school board sparks a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Japan by ordering Japanese students to be taught in racially segregated schools.
- 1910 – President Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first president to fly in an airplane.
- 1947 – The U.S. agreed to the United Nations Partition Plan of Palestine, which recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states.
- 1968 – NASA launches Apollo 7, the first successful manned Apollo mission, with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn F. Eisele and Walter Cunningham aboard.
- 1975 – Saturday Night Live premiered on NBC with George Carlin as host.
- 1984 – Astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan becomes the first American woman to perform a spacewalk.
- 1986 – President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Reykjavik, Iceland.
- 1991 – Professor Anita Hill gave her televised testimony concerning sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination.
- 2002 – Congress gave President George W. Bush its backing for using military force against Iraq.
