Air India Express Flight 1344 overshoots the runway at Calicut International Airport in the Malappuram district of Kerala, India, and crashes, killing 21 of the 190 people on board.
Space Shuttle Program: The Space Shuttle Discovery launches on STS-85 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Ada Deer, a Menominee activist, is sworn in as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
First American soldiers arrive in Saudi Arabia as part of the Gulf War.
Cold War: Lynne Cox becomes the first person to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union, crossing the Bering Strait from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union.
Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan's first astronauts.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal due to toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently.
Richard Nixon appoints Luis R. Bruce, a Mohawk-Oglala Sioux and co-founder of the National Congress of American Indians, as the new commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Vietnam War: The U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.
Canadian-born American pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey is awarded the U.S. President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for her refusal to authorize thalidomide.
IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).
World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal begins as the United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
The last confirmed lynching of black people in the Northern United States occurs in Marion, Indiana; two men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, are murdered.
The first British Grand Prix was held at Brooklands.
Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York, New York to San Francisco, California.
The first Australian rules football match is played between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College.
U.S. President George Washington invokes the Militia Acts of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.
American troops destroy the Miami town of Kenapacomaqua near the site of present-day Logansport, Indiana in the Northwest Indian War.
The first federal Indian Reservation is created by the United States.
The Treaty of Åbo ended the 1741–1743 Russo-Swedish War.