Today in 1847 after 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City; and in 1969 Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

July 24 is the 205th day of the year (206th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 160 days remaining until the end of the year.

Our on this day in history archives contain over 200,000 events, birthdays and deaths from 6,000 years of history. Here is a roundup of a few of them:

EVENTS

1132 – Battle of Nocera between Ranulf II of Alife and Roger II of Sicily.

1148 – King Louis VII of France lays siege to Damascus during the Second Crusade.

1245 – Pope Innocent IV forces King Sancho II of Portugal out, and replaces him with Afonso III of Portugal.

1411 – The Battle of Harlaw, one of the bloodiest in Scotland, takes place.

1487 – Citizens of Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, strike against a ban on foreign beer.

1534 – Jacques Cartier plants a cross on the Gaspe peninsula in present-day Quebec, taking possession of the territory and naming it after Francis I of France.

1567 – Mary, Queen of Scots, is deposed and replaced by her 1-year-old son King King James VI.

1701 – Detroit, Michigan is founded.

1783 – The Kingdom of Georgia and the Russian Empire sign the Treaty of Georgievsk.

1814 – War of 1812: General Phineas Riall advances toward Niagara to halt Jacob Brown's American invaders.

1823 – Chile abolishes Slavery.

1823 – The Naval Battle of Lake Maracaibo takes place.

1832 – Benjamin Bonneville leads the first wagon train across the Rocky Mountains by using Wyoming's South Pass.

1847 – After 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City.

1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Kernstown – Confederate General Jubal Early defeats Union troops led by General George Crook in an effort to keep Yankees out of the Shenandoah Valley.

1866 – Reconstruction: Tennessee becomes the first U.S. state to be readmitted to the Union following the American Civil War.

1901 – O. Henry is released from prison in Austin, Texas after serving three years for embezzlement from a bank.

1910 – James MacGillivray publishes the first account of Paul Bunyan in the Detroit News.

1911 – Hiram Bingham III re-discovers Machu Picchu "the Lost City of the Incas".

1915 – Passenger ship Eastland capsizes in central Chicago, with the loss of 845 lives.

1922 – The draft of the British Mandate for Palestine is officially confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations.

1923 – The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.

1924 – Archaeologist Themistoklis Sofoulis becomes Prime Minister of Greece.

1927 – The Menin Gate war memorial is unveiled at Ypres.

1929 – The Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it was first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928 by most leading world powers).

1931 – A fire at a home for aged people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania kills 48 people.

1935 – The dust bowl heat wave reaches its peak, sending temperatures to 109 °F (44 °C) in Chicago and 104 °F (40 °C) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

1937 – Alabama drops rape charges against the so-called "Scottsboro Boys."

1938 – The first successful climb of the Eiger North Face is made.

1943 – World War II: Operation Gomorrah begins: British and Canadian aeroplanes bomb Hamburg by night, those of the Americans by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.

1950 – Bumper 8 becomes the first aircraft to be launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

1956 – At New York City's Copacabana Club, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis perform their last comedy show together which started on July 25, 1946, almost exactly ten years earlier.

1959 – At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, US vice-president Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev have a "kitchen debate."

1965 – Vietnam War: Four F-4C Phantoms escorting a bombing raid at Kang Chi are the targets of anti-aircraft missiles in the first such attack against American planes in the war. One is shot down and the other three sustain damage.

1966 – Michael Petkey makes the first BASE jump from El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, along with Brian Schubert. They both end up with broken bones.

1967 – During an official state visit to Canada, French President Charles de Gaulle declares to a crowd of over 100,000 in Montreal: Vive le Québec libre! (Long live free Quebec!). The statement, interpreted as support for Quebec independence, delighted many Quebecers but angered the Canadian government and many English Canadians.

1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

1974 – Watergate scandal: The United States Supreme Court unanimously rule that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.

1974 – Konstantinos Karamanlis arrives in Greece, following the collapse of the military junta.

1977 – End of the four-day long Libyan-Egyptian War.

1983 – George Brett, batting for the Kansas City Royals against the New York Yankees, has a game-winning home run nullified in the "Pine Tar Incident".

1990 – Iraqi forces start massing on the Kuwaiti border, preparing for the invasion on August 2.

1998 – Russel Eugene Weston Jr. bursts into the United States Capitol and opens fire killing two police officers. He is later ruled to be incompetent to stand trial.

2001 – Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the last Tsar of Bulgaria when he was a child, is sworn in as Prime Minister of Bulgaria, and became the only monarch in history to regain political power through democratic election to a different office. He becomes Prime Minister under the name Simeon Saksburggotsky.

2001 – The Taiwan Solidarity Union is established.

2002 – James Traficant is expelled from the United States House of Representatives on a vote of 420 to 1.

2002 – Alfred Moisiu becomes President of Albania.

2005 – Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France for seventh consecutive year. After being revealed to have taken illegal drugs to improve his performance during his career, all of his Tour de France titles are removed from the record in 2012.

2010 – Love Parade disaster: At a stampede at a music festival in Duisburg, Germany, 19 people are crushed to death. 2 later die in hospital, as a result of their injuries.

2010 – Over 80,000 people record their lives for the YouTube documentary A Life in a Day.

2012 – President of Ghana John Atta Mills dies aged 68. His Vice President John Dramani Mahama is sworn in as President later the same day.

2013 – A passenger train carrying over 218 people crashes just outside Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, northwest Spain, killing at least 80 people and injuring at least 130. It was travelling from Madrid to Ferrol on the Galician coast when it crashed. It occurred a day before the regional July 25 holiday in Galicia.

2014 – Air Algerie Flight 5017 crashes in Mali on a flight between Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Algiers, Algeria.

2014 – Reuven Rivlin becomes the 10th President of Israel, succeeding Shimon Peres.

2015 – Barack Obama makes the first visit by a US president to Kenya.

2016 – The International Olympic Committee decides against banning the entire Russian team from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, after its track-and-field athletes had already been banned following a doping scandal.

2019 – Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking over from Theresa May. One of his first actions is a massive change of the jobs in the cabinet.