1902 -- Edward VII was crowned King of Great Britain and Ireland at Westminster Abbey, succeeding Queen Victoria, who had reigned for 64 years.

1903 -- Following the death of Pope Leo XIII, Giuseppe Sarto was crowned as Pope Pius X before 70,000 people.

1919 -- Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Italian composer and librettist famed for his opera "Pagliacci", died.

1942 -- After the All-India Congress agreed on a "quit India" campaign, the British colonial authorities arrested Mahatma Gandhi and 50 others in Bombay.

1945 -- The United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, this time on the city of Nagasaki; a wide area was reduced to ashes and more than 70,000 people were killed.

1974 -- Gerald Ford was sworn in as 38th president of the United States after Richard Nixon resigned.

1975 -- Dmitri Shostakovich, Soviet composer, died. He wrote 15 symphonies as well as operas, ballets and film and theatre scores.

1995 -- Jerry Garcia, leader of the Grateful Dead rock band and a leading symbol of the U.S. counter-culture revolution of the 1960s, died.

2000 -- Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez arrived on the first visit to Iraq by an elected head of state since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

2004 -- Terry Nichols was sentenced to 161 life sentences without parole for the deadly 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in the United States, which killed 168 people.

2005 -- Canadian-born Peter Jennings, a high school dropout who rose to become prime-time anchorman for ABC News and whose career spanned five decades, died aged 67.