In 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted a Declaration of Rights.

In 1898, Philippine nationalists declared independence from Spain.

In 1920, the Republican national convention, meeting in Chicago, nominated Warren G. Harding for president on the tenth ballot; Calvin Coolidge was nominated for vice president.

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge was nominated for a term of office in his own right at the Republican national convention in Cleveland. (Coolidge had become president in 1923 upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding.)

In 1939, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York.

In 1942, Anne Frank, a Germanborn Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.

In 1957, bandleader Jimmy Dorsey died in New York at age 53.

In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)

In 1967, the James Bond film “You Only Live Twice,” starring Sean Connery, premiered in London, a day before its U.S. opening.

In 1979, 26-year-old cyclist Bryan Allen flew the human-powered Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

In 1997, baseball began regular-season interleague play, ending a 126-year tradition of separating the major leagues until the World Series. (In the first game played under this arrangement, the San Francisco Giants defeated the Texas Rangers 4-3.) The Treasury Department unveiled a new 50-dollar bill meant to be more counterfeit-resistant.