1494 - Christopher Columbus first sighted the island which was later to be named Jamaica.

1500 - The Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral landed in Brazil and claimed it for his own country. The land had been visited by Spanish navigator Vicente Yanes Pinzon in January but the discovery was not followed up.

1616 - The second civil war in France ended with the signing of the treaty of Loudun, granting an amnesty for the rebellious Prince of Conde.

1791 - A liberal bill of rights reforming gentry-ruled Poland and setting up a constitutional monarchy, was signed by king Stanislaw Augustus. It was only the second written Constitution in the world after the United States.

1939 - Maxim Litvinov was removed as Soviet foreign minister and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov.

1945 - U.S. forces met up with the Russians in the Wismar area; Innsbruck was captured; Trieste was entered by New Zealand troops.

1965 - Cambodia broke off diplomatic relations with the United States after a weekly magazine carried an article felt to be derogatory to the royal family.

1968 - In Paris, students and police clashed violently at the start of a month of disturbances and strikes.

1971 - Walter Ulbricht retired as first secretary of the East German Communist Party and was succeeded by Erich Honecker.

1996 - Delegates from 55 countries agreed at a UN conference in Geneva on new rules for landmine use, but rejected an all-out ban.

1998 - A body unearthed on a Berlin building site over 20 years earlier was finally confirmed by DNA tests as belonging to Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler's infamous right-hand man .

1998 - Croatian defense minister Gojko Susak, the leading light of the hardline nationalists in Croatia's ruling party, died from cancer.

1999 - The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 11,000 points for the first time ever.