According to Aztec tradition, wandering Mexica people saw an eagle devouring a serpent atop a cactus on a swampy island in Lake Texcoco, fulfilling a prophecy that marked where they should build their city. Tenochtitlan grew into the magnificent capital of the Aztec Empire, later conquered by Spanish forces, its ruins now underlying modern Mexico City.
After less than a year of exile on Elba, Napoleon boarded the Inconstant with roughly 1,000 Guardsmen and slipped past British and French patrol ships. He landed near Cannes days later, marching on Paris and reclaiming his throne without firing a shot, setting the stage for Waterloo.
Jacob Davis, a Nevada tailor, had been reinforcing miners' trousers with copper rivets at stress points to stop them from ripping. Lacking money to patent the idea himself, he partnered with San Francisco dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss. Their joint patent, granted this day, launched a garment that evolved from workwear into a global cultural icon.
Weeks after Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members, the presidential commission chaired by William Rogers began its investigation. Physicist Richard Feynman's later demonstration of the O-ring's failure in cold rubber, dipped in a glass of ice water at a hearing, became one of the most famous moments in science communication.
Ramzi Yousef and accomplices parked a rented van packed with explosives in the North Tower's basement garage and detonated it at 12:18 PM, hoping to topple the tower into its twin. The blast killed six people, injured over a thousand, and carved a seven-story crater, but the towers stood, a warning largely unheeded until 2001.
After a sustained bombardment and street-by-street fighting, Russian military commanders declared the Chechen capital of Grozny fully under Russian control. The campaign reduced much of the city to rubble and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents, marking a grim turning point in the Second Chechen War and consolidating Moscow's grip on the breakaway republic.