Facing a baronial revolt over crushing taxation and arbitrary rule, King John met his opponents in a meadow beside the Thames and agreed to the charter's 63 clauses. It promised protections against unlawful imprisonment and limits on royal power. John repudiated it within weeks, and war followed anyway, but the document survived as a foundational reference point for constitutional government in the English-speaking world.

Months after garroting the captured Inca emperor Atahualpa, Pizarro led his men into Cusco, the sacred capital high in the Andes. The city's temples glittered with gold, which the conquistadors stripped within weeks. Cusco's fall marked the effective collapse of organized Inca resistance in the empire's heartland, though guerrilla warfare and a rival Inca state would persist for decades.

Amid fears of arbitrary royal imprisonment during the reign of Charles II, Parliament enacted a law compelling jailers to produce detained persons before a court and show lawful cause for their confinement. It closed loopholes that had let the crown shuffle prisoners between jurisdictions to dodge the writ, becoming a cornerstone protection against unlawful detention across the British legal tradition and its former colonies.

Franklin, testing his theory that lightning was simply electricity, flew a kite topped with a metal wire during a storm and connected a key to the wet string, drawing a charge he could feel and store. Though the exact date is disputed, the experiment — recounted by Franklin and his associate Joseph Priestley — became one of the era's most famous demonstrations, directly inspiring the lightning rod.

Racing to strike before the Prussian and Anglo-allied armies could unite, Napoleon pushed roughly 124,000 troops across the Sambre near Charleroi. The move caught the allies partially off guard and triggered the frantic marches and skirmishes at Ligny and Quatre Bras that preceded Waterloo on June 18. It was Napoleon's last offensive campaign, a gamble to shatter his enemies before Europe's full coalition could crush him.

The new law replaced America's old registration-only patent system, in which anyone could file a claim with no vetting, with an examination process run by trained officials checking for genuine novelty and utility. It followed a devastating 1836 fire that destroyed roughly 10,000 existing patent records, prompting Congress to also establish a numbering and preservation system for the fledgling agency.

Congress admitted Minnesota to statehood, capping a rapid transformation from remote fur-trading territory to settled frontier following forced land cessions by Dakota and Ojibwe peoples in the 1850s. The new state's population had exploded through the decade, and its statehood arrived just three years before the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 exposed the violence underlying that transformation.

After nearly 16 hours battling fog, ice, and engine trouble, British aviators Alcock and Brown crash-landed nose-first into a peat bog near Clifden, Ireland, having crossed roughly 1,890 miles of open ocean nonstop from St. John's, Newfoundland. Neither man was seriously hurt. The flight won them the Daily Mail's £10,000 prize and proved long-distance aviation across open ocean was possible, eight years before Lindbergh's solo New York-to-Paris flight.

With President F.W. de Klerk pushing reform after years of internal unrest and international sanctions, parliament scrapped the Group Areas Act and related land laws that had forcibly segregated South Africans by race for over four decades. The move followed the 1990 unbanning of the ANC and release of Nelson Mandela, and it cleared a major legal barrier on the path toward the negotiated end of apartheid and the 1994 democratic elections.