2017: Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2004. The storm causes catastrophic flooding throughout much of eastern Texas, killing 90 people and causing $198.6 billion in damage.
2012: Voyager 1 spacecraft enters interstellar space becoming the first man-made object to do so.
2006: Former Prime Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Lazarenko is sentenced to nine years imprisonment for money laundering, wire fraud, and extortion.
2001: American singer Aaliyah and several members of her record company are killed as their overloaded aircraft crashes shortly after takeoff from Marsh Harbour Airport, Bahamas.
1997: Egon Krenz, the former East German leader, is convicted of a shoot-to-kill policy at the Berlin Wall.
1961: President Jânio Quadros of Brazil resigns after just seven months in power, initiating a political crisis that culminates in a military coup in 1964.
1950: President Harry Truman orders the U.S. Army to seize control of the nation's railroads to avert a strike.
1945: Ten days after World War II ends with Japan announcing its surrender, armed supporters of the Chinese Communist Party kill U.S. intelligence officer John Birch, regarded by some of the American right as the first victim of the Cold War.
1944: World War II: Paris is liberated by the Allies.
1942: World War II: Second day of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons; a Japanese naval transport convoy headed towards Guadalcanal is turned back by an Allied air attack.
1914: World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts are lost.
1898: Seven hundred Greek civilians, 17 British guards and the British Consul of Crete are killed by a Turkish mob in Heraklion, Greece.
1894: Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.
1883: France and Viet Nam sign the Treaty of Huế, recognizing a French protectorate over Annam and Tonkin.
1875: Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to swim across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in 22 hours.
1258: Regent George Mouzalon and his brothers are killed during a coup headed by the aristocratic faction under, paving the way for its leader, Michael VIII Palaiologos, to ultimately usurp the throne of the Empire of Nicaea.
1248: The Dutch city of Ommen receives city rights and fortification rights from Otto III, the Archbishop of Utrecht.
766: Emperor Constantine V humiliates nineteen high-ranking officials, after discovering a plot against him. He executes the leaders, Constantine Podopagouros and his brother Strategios.