1965 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law.
1619 - The first representative assembly in America convened in Jamestown, Va.
1729 - The city of Baltimore was founded.
1863 - American automaker Henry Ford was born in Dearborn Township, Mich.
1889 - Vladimir Zworykin, called the "Father of Television" for inventing the iconoscope, was born in Russia.
1942 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill creating a womens auxiliary agency in the Navy known as Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES.
1945 - The USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine; 880 men lost their lives.
1975 - Former Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in suburban Detroit. Although presumed dead, his remains have never been found.
2002 - WNBA player Lisa Leslie of the Los Angeles Sparks became the first woman to dunk in a professional game during her teams 82-73 loss to the Miami Sol.