On July 22, 1587, a second English colony, fated to vanish four years later under mysterious circumstances, was established on Roanoke Island off present-day North Carolina.
In 1796 Gen. Moses Cleaveland founded the city of Cleveland.
In 1822 botanist Gregor Mendel was born Johann Mendel in Heinzendorf, Austria.
In 1890 Rose Fitzgerald, who would become the matriarch of the Kennedy political dynasty, was born in Boston.
In 1916 a bomb went off during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, killing 10 people.
In 1933 American aviator Wiley Post completed the first solo flight around the world in 7 days, 18 hours and 49 minutes.
In 1934 bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater on the North Side.
In 1937 the Senate defeated President Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court.
In 1941 funk singer and producer George Clinton was born in Kannapolis, N.C.
In 1942 wartime gasoline rationing began along the Atlantic Seaboard.
In 1967 poet Carl Sandburg died in Flat Rock, N.C.; he was 89.
In 1975, more than 100 years after the Civil War, Congress voted to restore the citizenship of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
In 1981 Mehmet Ali Agca was found guilty by a court in Rome and sentenced to life in prison for shooting Pope John Paul II.
In 1991 police in Milwaukee arrested Jeffrey Dahmer after human body parts were discovered in his apartment. (Convicted and sentenced, he would be murdered in a Portage, Wis., prison in 1994.) Also in 1991 former White Sox owner Bill Veeck was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
In 1995 a Union, S.C., jury convicted Susan Smith of first-degree murder for drowning her two sons. She later was sentenced to life in prison.
In 1998 Iran tested a medium-range missile capable of reaching Israel or Saudi Arabia.
In 2003 Saddam Hussein’s sons Udai and Qusai were killed in a firefight with U.S. forces in Mosul, Iraq.
