753 BC – According to legend, Rome is founded by Romulus on this date.
1509 – Death of King Henry VII of England.
1699 – Death of French poet and playwright Jean Racine.
1809 – Napoleon's army defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Landshut in Germany.
1836 – The Mexicans defeated by the Texans at the battle of San Jacinto, thus ensuring Texan independence.
1856 – Eight-hour working day adopted in Australia, in what is believed a world first.
1861 – Australian explorers Robert Burke, William Wills and John King arrive back at Cooper Creek to find only small amount of provisions and tree marked "Dig, 21st April, 1861". Base camp party had left only seven hours before. Burke and Wills died; King saved by Aborigines.
1910 – Death of US author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
1918 – Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the German ace known as the Red Baron, is killed in action during World War I. He had shot down 80 enemy aircraft.
1928 – France's Aristide Briand submits his draft treaty for outlawing war.
1945 – Last German troops leave Bologna, Italy in World War II; on the same day Russian troops reach suburbs of Berlin.
1946 – Death of John Maynard Keynes, English economist and journalist.
1954 – United States flies French battalion to Indochina to defend Dien Bien Phu.
1956 – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen sign military alliance at Jedda.
1959 – English ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn is jailed for a day in Panama while the police look for her Panamanian husband, accused of plotting a coup.
1960 – Australia's new Commonwealth Police Force begins operations.
1960 – Brazil's capital moves from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia.
1961 – A French army revolt led by General Maurice Challe begins in Algeria.
1966 – Surgeons in Houston, Texas, make what is said to be first implant of an artificial heart in a human.
1967 – Military coup in Athens establishes the regime of the Greek Colonels.
1968 – British Conservative politician Enoch Powell makes his "rivers of blood" speech, warning of the dangers of immigration.
1971 – Death of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, president of Haiti since 1957.
1972 – Two US Apollo 16 astronauts spend seven hours exploring highlands of the Moon.
1975 – South Vietnam's President Nguyen van Thieu resigns and names successor to seek negotiations with Communist forces sweeping across country.
1977 – Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto assumes emergency powers and imposes martial law on three major cities in crackdown on opponents trying to force his resignation.
1986 – Soldiers attack rebel camp in Philippines, 41 people die.
1987 – Terrorists explode powerful bomb at height of rush hour near main bus station in Colombo, Sri Lanka, killing 150 people.
1989 – Thousands of students, shouting for democracy and human rights, march from campuses to converge on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
1990 – Moscow expands its energy embargo of Lithuania to include shipments of food, metal and industrial parts, in effort to get the republic to revoke declaration of independence.
1991 – Soviet hardliners launch a petition drive for a Parliament session to impose a national state of emergency and take President Mikhail Gorbachev to task over worsening ethnic and economic troubles.
1992 – California carries out its first execution in 25 years when double murderer Robert Alton Harris is put to death in the gas chamber.
1993 – The Supreme Court in La Paz, Bolivia, sentences former dictator Luis Garcia Meza to 30 years in jail without parole for murder, theft, fraud and violating the constitution.
1994 – Belfast court clears Paul Hill of the 1974 murder of a former British soldier, absolving him of IRA guerrilla links for which he was wrongfully jailed for 13 years.
1994 – Bosnian Serbs bombard Gorazde with cannon fire in the heaviest assault of a three-week offensive.
1995 – Iran lines up with Egypt and Syria to try to link the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to a dismantling of Israel's nuclear arsenal.
1995 – FBI arrests former soldier Timothy McVeigh at an Oklahoma jail where he'd spent two days on minor traffic and weapons charges; he was charged in connection with the deadly Oklahoma City bombing two days earlier.
1995 – Australian Rugby League launches Federal Court damages claim against Super League for interference in the game.
1996 – The centre-left Olive Tree coalition wins the Italian general election, the left's first win since World War II.
1997 – The first Chinese Army soldiers march into Hong Kong, in preparation for the handover of the British colony to China on July 1.
1997 – The ashes of 1960s LSD guru Timothy Leary and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry are blasted into space in the world's first space funeral.
1998 – France announces an accord on the future of New Caledonia, easing more than a decade of tension between pro and anti-independence forces.
1998 – Peruvian police capture Pedro Domingo Quinteros, second in command of the Shining Path guerrilla group.
1998 – South Korea drops efforts to get compensation from Japan for women held as sex slaves during World War II, and says it will pay surviving women.
1999 – US intelligence officials tell the US Congress that aggressive espionage in the United States allowed China to modernise its nuclear arsenal.
1999 – NATO warplanes blast Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's party headquarters in Belgrade.
2000- The lower house of the Russian parliament overwhelmingly approved the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which would oblige Russia to end all nuclear test explosions.
