On July 8, 1497, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon on a voyage that would lead to discovery of a sea route to India around the southern tip of Africa.

In 1822 English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat capsized off Spezia, Italy.

In 1835 the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia cracked as it was being rung for the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall.

In 1959 Maj. Dale R. Buis of Imperial Beach, Calif., and M. Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand of Copperas Cove, Texas, were the first American soldiers to be killed in the Vietnam War.

In 1993 a jury in Boise, Idaho, acquitted white separatist Randy Weaver and a co-defendant of the slaying of a federal marshal in a shootout at a remote mountain cabin.