1915 - Porfirio Diaz, Mexican soldier and president (1877-1911), died in Paris.

1937 - Amelia Earhart and co-pilot Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific while trying to fly around the world.

1961 - Ernest Hemingway, U.S. novelist best known for **** A Farewell to Arms **** and **** For Whom the Bell Tolls ****, shot himself fearing ill health.

1964 - U.S. president Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, prohibiting racial discrimination.

1976 - North and South Vietnam were reunited as one country with Hanoi as the capital following the Vietnam War. It had been divided since 1954.

1985 - Andrei Gromyko became president of the Soviet Union, with Eduard Shevardnadze replacing him as foreign minister.

Gromyko died on this day in 1989.

1990 - More than 1,000 Muslim pilgrims died in a stampede in a tunnel at the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

1998 - Pakistan's Mohammad Alam Channa, the world's tallest man at 7 feet, 7.25 inches (2.317 meters), died aged 42.

1999 - Mario Puzo, U.S. author whose bestseller ****The Godfather **** spawned the Mafia film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola, died. He was 78.

2001 - The world's first self-contained mechanical heart was implanted into a patient in a seven-hour operation by University of Louisville surgeons Laman Gray and Robert Dowling.