August 20

• August 20, 1191
  Crusader King Richard I executes some 2,700 Muslim prisoners in Acre
• August 20, 1530
  Hayreddin Barbarossa, a Barbary pirate, unites Algeria and Tunisia as military states under the Ottoman caliphate and becomes admiral of the Ottoman fleet
• August 20, 1619
  The first African slaves arrive to North America aboard a Dutch privateer and dock in Jamestown, Virginia, with twenty human captives among its cargo
• August 20, 1672
  Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland and key figure in Dutch politics, is assassinated by a carefully organized lynch mob by a shot in the neck, and his naked body is hanged and mutilated beside body of his brother Cornelis de Witt
• August 20, 1745
  Bonnie Prince Charlie occupies Blair Castle, Scotland
• August 20, 1847
  General Winfield Scott wins the Battle of Churubusco, only 8 kilometers away from Mexico City
• August 20, 1860
  Robert O'Hara Burke leads a group of 15 men, 27 camels and 23 horses out of Melbourne on an expedition to cross Australia
• August 20, 1913
  Adolphe Pégoud becomes the first pilot to parachute from an aircraft
• August 20, 1939
  Soviet forces under Lieutenant General Georgi Zhukov successfully counterattack Japanese invaders at Nomanhan in the Mongolian People's Republic on the border with Manchukuo
• August 20, 1940
  Ramón Mercader, agent of Josef Stalin, fatally stabs Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico City
• August 20, 1956
  The Calder Hall atomic power station begins operation in Cumberland, Great Britain, generating up to 90,000 kilowatts of power and manufacturing plutonium becoming the world's first power station to generate electricity on an industrial scale
• August 20, 2011
  In the Battle of Tripoli, Libyan rebels take control the nation's capital, effectively overthrowing the government of Muammar Gaddafi

July 22

• July 22, 1298
  King Edward I combines bowmen and cavalry to defeat William Wallace's Scots at Falkirk
• July 22, 1306
  Philip IV of France seizes all Jewish property and expels about 100,000 men from France
• July 22, 1456
  At the Battle of Belgrade, the Hungarian army under prince Janos Hunyadi beat sultan Mehmed II ending the siege of Belgrade with fail
• July 22, 1587
  A second English colony of 114-150 people under John White, financed by Sir Walter Raleigh, is established on Roanoke Island off North Carolina
• July 22, 1620
  The Pilgrims, early English settlers of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Plymouth, United States, set out from Holland destined for the New World via Southampton in England
• July 22, 1652
  Prince Conde's rebels narrowly defeat Chief Minister Mazarin's loyalist forces at St. Martin, near Paris
• July 22, 1745
  Second Jacobite Rebellion begins by Charles Edward Stuart in Scotland
• July 22, 1795
  Spain sign the Peace of Basel, a treaty with France ending the War of the Pyrenees and ceding Santo Domingo to France
• July 22, 1796
  Cleveland, Ohio, is founded by General Moses Cleaveland while surveying the land
• July 22, 1802
  A British exploring party led by Matthew Flinders set sail from Sydney to make the first circumnavigation of the Australia and identify it as a continent
• July 22, 1812
  English troops under the Duke of Wellington defeats the French at the Battle of Salamanca in Spain
• July 22, 1864
  The Battle of Atlanta reachs its peak when Confederate General John Bell Hood launches an all-out attack on Union General William T. Sherman's Army
• July 22, 1894
  The first major automobile race with prizes and a promoter is organized as a reliability trial by Le Petit Journal of Paris on the 78-kilometer route between Paris and Rouen, France
• July 22, 1972
  Venera 8 lands on Venus
• July 22, 1994
  Shoemaker-Levy Comet strikes Jupiter
• July 22, 2011
  Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 people in twin terrorist attacks in Norway after a bombing in the Regjeringskvartalet government center in Oslo and a shooting at a political youth camp on the island of Utøya

April 16

• April 16, 1457 BC
  Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III defeats a large rebellious coalition of Canaanite vassal states led by the king of Kadesh at the Battle of Megiddo
• April 16, 1071
  The Norman Robert Guiscard takes Bari, ending five centuries of Byzantine rule in southern Italy
• April 16, 1705
  Queen Anne of England knights Isaac Newton at Trinity College
• April 16, 1746
  The Battle of Culloden becomes a crushing defeat for Jacobites and ends an attempt of Charles Edward Stuart, known as The Young Pretender, to regain the British throne during Second Jacobite Rebellion
• April 16, 1760
  In England Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers, is hanged as a felon in the Tower of London for the murder of his steward
• April 16, 1853
  The first steam locomotive in Asia begin running from Bombay to Tanna, India, pulling 14 cars and 400 people
• April 16, 1856
  Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, ratified by 55 states, including the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire, abolishes privateering
• April 16, 1859
  Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker and historian, dies in Cannes
• April 16, 1866
  Dmitry Karakozov, a Russian revolutionary, makes the first attempt to assassinate Alexander II of Russia
• April 16, 1867
  Constitution of North German Confederation, written by Otto von Bismarck for a federation of 22 independent states of northern Germany, is accepted by Norddeutscher Reichstag
• April 16, 1945
  Battle of Berlin, the final major offensive of the European Theatre of World War II, is begun by the Soviet Union
• April 16, 1948
  Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OECD) forms in Paris, France, to help administer the Marshall Plan and stimulate economic progress
• April 16, 1964
  Nine men sentenced 25-30 years for Britain's 1963 "Great Train Robbery"
• April 16, 1977
  At the West Coast Computer Faire in SanFrancisco, California, Commodore International demonstrates the PET 2001 computer, and Apple Computer introduces the Apple II, marking start of era of mass-produced personal computers
• April 16, 1991
  The Skoda company, an automobile manufacturer based in Czech Republic, is acquired by Volkswagen
• April 16, 2003
  The Treaty of Accession is signed in Athens, Greece, allowing ten new members into the European Union
• April 16, 2006
  Prince Albert II of Monaco reaches the North Pole, becoming the first reigning monarch ever to do so
• April 16, 2009
  Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Russian Federal Security Service, announces that they "cancelled the decree imposing an anti-terror operation on the territory of, effective from midnight", which ends the Second Chechen War