764: Tibetan troops occupy Chang’an for 15 days, capital of the Chinese Tang Dynasty

1880: Best-selling American novel “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ” by soldier Lew Wallace is published

1927: Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, paving the way for Joseph Stalin to consolidate complete power

1942: Naval Battle of Guadalcanal begins between Allied and Japanese naval forces in the Solomon Islands; US forces prevail after days of intense fighting

1966: Buzz Aldrin takes the first “space selfie,” a photo of himself performing extravehicular activity in space during the Gemini 12 mission

1968: US Supreme Court: Epperson v. Arkansas declares unconstitutional the Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools

1970: Cyclone Bhola makes landfall in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), killing up to 500,000 people, making it the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded

1990: The World Wide Web is first proposed by CERN computer scientists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau

Source: Onthisday.com