1958 – Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita is published in the United States.

1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage.

1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho allegedly flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers.

1982 – The first Compact Discs (CDs) are released to the public in Germany.

1970 – Venera program: Venera 7 launched. It will later become the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus).

1959 – Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, the much acclaimed and highly influential best selling jazz recording of all time, is released.

1958 – Pioneer 0, America's first attempt at lunar orbit, is launched using the first Thor-Able rocket and fails. Notable as one of the first attempted launches beyond Earth orbit by any country.

1896 – Bridget Driscoll is run over by a Benz car in the grounds of The Crystal Palace, London, the UK's first pedestrian motoring fatality.

1974 – Punk Rock pioneers The Ramones play their first show in a local New York club named CBGB.

1929 – The 1929 Palestine riots break out in Mandatory Palestine between Palestinian Arabs and Jews and continue until the end of the month. In total, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs are killed.

1896 – Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack and Dawson Charlie discover gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush.

1977 – The Big Ear, a radio telescope operated by Ohio State University as part of the SETI project, receives a radio signal from deep space; the event is named the "Wow! signal" from the notation made by a volunteer on the project.

1971 – President Richard Nixon completes the break from the gold standard by ending convertibility of the United States dollar into gold by foreign investors.

1969 – Woodstock rock and roll concert opens.

1965 – The Beatles play to nearly 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York, New York, an event later regarded as the birth of stadium rock.

1914 – A male servant of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright sets fire to the living quarters of the latter's Wisconsin home, Taliesin, murders seven people and burns the living quarters to the ground.

1962 - Two gunmen hijack a mail truck in Plymouth, MA, bound for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston.  No one was ever convicted of the crime and the haul of $1.5 million in cash (equivalent to approximately $11,694,719 in 2013 dollars) remains undiscovered by the authorities.

1975 – The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the longest-running release in film history, opens at the USA Theatre in Westwood, Los Angeles, California

1935 – Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, creating a government pension system for the retired

1901 – The first claimed powered flight, by Gustave Whitehead in his Number 21