1703 – After winning access to the Baltic Sea, Czar Peter I founded St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital.
1794 – Industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in New York City.
1818 – Amelia Jenks Bloomer, women’s rights advocate and newspaper publisher, was born in Homer, NY.
1878 – Dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, CA.
1894 – Author Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, MD.
1937 – Ceremonies marking the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge were held in San Francisco, CA.
1941 – The British navy sunk the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France, killing more than 2,000 men.
1994 – Two decades after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, returned to Russia.
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