This Day in History

[GordMay]

June 9

0068: Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide, imploring his secretary Epaphroditos to slit his throat, to evade a Senate-imposed death by flogging.

1534: French navigator Jacques Cartier becomes the first European explorer to encounter the St. Lawrence River in present-day Quebec, Canada.

1672: Peter I (the Great), emperor of Russia, born in Moscow.

1772: In an incident that some regard as the first naval engagement of the American Revolution, colonists board the “Gaspee”, a British vessel that ran aground off the coast of Rhode Island, and set it aflame. The “Gaspee” was pursuing the “Hanna”, an American smuggling ship, when it ran aground off Namquit Point in Providence’s Narragansett Bay on June 9. That evening, John Brown, an American merchant angered by high British taxes on his goods, rowed out to the Gaspee with a number of other colonists and seized control of the ship. After leading away its crew, the Americans set the “Gaspee” afire.

1781: English engineer George Stephenson, the principal inventor of the railroad locomotive, was born.

1789: Spanish capture British schooner “Northwest America”, near Vancouver Island.

1803: British explorer Matthew Flinders arrives in Sydney, becoming the first person to circumnavigate Australia, proving it is one continent.

1870: English writer Charles Dickens, generally considered the greatest Victorian novelist, died at Gad's Hill, near Chatham, Kent.

1891: French painter Paul Gauguin arrives in Papeete, Tahiti.

1928: Charles Kingsford-Smith & Charles Ulm are 1st to fly across the Pacific, when they end their flight from California to Brisbane.

1942: Nazis kill all inhabitants of Lidice, which had been implicated in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi controller of Bohemia and Moravia, to “teach the Czechs a final lesson of subservience and humility”.

1954: Joseph Welch asks US Senator Joseph McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" during Senate-Army hearings.

1973: American racehorse ‘Secretariat’ won the 105th running of the Belmont Stakes (by an unprecedented 31 lengths) to capture the Triple Crown; he earlier had won the Kentucky Derby, and the Preakness Stakes.
➥

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfCMtaNiMDM

2013: Edward Snowden publicly makes his identity known as the leaker of NSA documents.

[GordMay]

June 10

1190: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa) drowned, while trying to cross the Saleph River, on the Third Crusade to the Holy Land.

1692: Being found guilty of “certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft and Sorceries”, Bridget Bishop became the first person [of 20] to be hanged, during the Salem witch trials, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was also accused of "dressing more artistically than women of the village", by using colored lace, and playing shuffleboard - both signs of consorting with the devil.

1752: Reportedly, on this day, flying his kite, Benjamin Franklin identifies lightning as electricity.
According to Franklin's description of the experiment, a silk kite with string that led to a key was to be flown during the early stages of a storm. The kite had a separate silk string that was attached to the kite string near the key. The kite flyer was to stand under a shelter so that he and the silk string stayed dry protecting them from the electric charge. It is unlikely the kite was struck by lightning, as this would have probably seriously injured Franklin, but simply gathered electricity from the storm as Franklin predicted it would.

1772: Rhode Islanders, in the American colonies, boarded and sank the British revenue cutter “Gaspee”, in Narragansett Bay.

1776: The Continental Congress appoints a committee, to write a Declaration of Independence.

1801: The Tripolitan War, between the United States and the Barbary States, began.

1836: French physicist, mathematician André Marie Ampère died. The electrical measurement "ampere" is named for him. He developed the science of electro-magnetism.

1858: British botanist, Robert Brown died. Known for his description of ‘Brownian motion’ (1827), which is the rapid movement of minute particles suspended in liquid. Albert Einstein used Brownian motion to prove the existence of atoms (1905).

1898: U.S. Marines landed at Guantánamo Bay. For the next month, American troops fought a land war in Cuba, that resulted in the end of Spanish colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere. Cuban rebels had gained the sympathy of the American public, while the explosion and sinking of the U.S.S. “Maine”, widely blamed by the ‘yellow press’[especially by the Hearst press] on the Spanish, despite the absence of conclusive evidence, further boosted American nationalistic fervor.

1909: An ‘SOS’ signal is transmitted for the first time in an emergency when the Cunard liner SS “Slavonia” is wrecked off the Azores.

1925: Tennessee adopts a new biology text book, denying the theory of evolution.

1940: Italy, under the rule of Benito Mussolini, declared war against France and Great Britain, entering World War II.

1963: Buddhist monk Ngo Quang Duc dies, by self immolation, in Saigon, to protest persecution, by the Diem government, of Vietnam.

[GordMay]

June 11

1184 BC: Trojan War: Troy is sacked and burned, according to calculations by Eratosthenes.

1517: Sir Thomas Pert reaches Hudson Bay.

1578: England grants Sir Humphrey Gilbert a patent, to explore and colonize North America.

1644: Florentine scientist Evangelista Torricelli describes his invention of the mercury barometer, in 1643, in a letter to Michelangelo Ricci.

1742: Benjamin Franklin invents his Franklin stove.

1770: Captain James Cook discovers Great Barrier Reef, off Australia [runs aground].

1788: Russian explorer Gerasim Izmailov reaches Alaska.
1788: 1st British ship built on Pacific coast begun at Nootka Sound, BC.

1895: Charles E. Duryea receives the first U.S. patent granted, to an American inventor, for a gasoline-driven automobile.

1901: Cook Islands annexed, and proclaimed part of New Zealand.

1910: Jacques Cousteau, French ocean explorer and engineer, born.

1927: Charles Lindbergh is awarded the 1st U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross.

1930: William Beebe, of the New York Zoological Society, dives to a record-setting depth of 1,426 feet off the coast of Bermuda, in a diving chamber called a bathysphere.

1955: Le Mans race car accident kills 83 spectators, and French driver Pierre Bouillin (Pierre Levegh), and injuring nearly 180 more (race continues).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMoh5hZAaZk

1959: Saunders-Roe “SR.N1", the first practical hovercraft, performs its first public flight.

1962: Brothers John and Clarence Anglin, and fellow inmate Frank Morris, escape from Alcatraz Island prison, the only ones to do so.

1963: Gov Wallace tries to prevent blacks registering at University of Alabama.

1967: A. J. Foyt and Dan Gurney drive a Ford to victory in 24 hours of Le Mans Grand Prix .

1991: Microsoft releases MS DOS 5.0.

1998: Compaq Computer pays $9 billion for Digital Equipment Corporation, in the largest high-tech acquisition.

2002: Antonio Meucci is acknowledged as the first inventor of the telephone, by the United States Congress.

2004: Ronald Reagan's funeral is held, at Washington National Cathedral.

2009: The World Health Organization declares ‘H1N1' swine flu to be a global pandemic, the first such incident in over forty years.

2018: Net neutrality is officially repealed, by The Federal Communications Commission, in the US.

[GordMay]

June 12

323 BCE: The king of Macedonia, Alexander the Great, died in Babylon.

1701: The Act of Settlement, the law that continues to regulate the succession to the throne, of the United Kingdom, was passed by Parliament.

1812: Napoleon Bonaparte, and his army, invade Russia.

1963: Black civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated, by Byron De La Beckwith, outside his home, in Jackson, Mississippi.

1966: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of Ernesto Miranda, in Miranda v. Arizona , affirming that constitutional guarantees against self-incrimination include restrictions on police interrogation of an arrested suspect.

1971: The New York Times began publishing the “Pentagon Papers”; a series of articles, based on a study of the U.S. role in Indochina, from World War II until May 1968; the papers added to the growing opposition to the Vietnam War.

1977: David Berkowitz gets 25 years to life, for the 'Son of Sam' murders, in New York.

1991: Mount Pinatubo, in western Luzon, the Philippines, begins erupting, for the first time in 600 years.

[GordMay]

June 13

323 BCE: Alexander the Great, the young Macedonian military genius who forged an empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to India, dies in Babylon, in present-day Iraq, at the age of 33.

1774: Rhode Island becomes first colony to prohibit importation of slaves.

1777: Lafayette lands in US. A 19-year-old French aristocrat, Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, arrives in South Carolina, with the intent to serve as General George Washington’s second-in-command.

1866: US House of representatives passes 14th Amendment [Citizenship Rights, Equal Protection, Apportionment, Civil War Debt].
➥ https://constitutioncenter.org/inter...RoCz_oQAvD_BwE

1881: The USS “Jeannette”, under the command of George Washington De Long, sinks in the Arctic circle, following 21 months of drifting, after becoming trapped in the ice.

1895: Emile Levassor wins the first automobile race in history; the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris, taking 48 hours and 48 minutes (1,178 km).

1920: The U.S. Post Office Department rules that children [any humans] may not be sent by parcel post.

1957: “Mayflower II”, from Plymouth, England, reaches Plymouth, Massachusetts.

1983: After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the world’s first outer-planetary probe, leaves the solar system. The next day, it radioed back its first scientific data on interstellar space.

1994: A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blames recklessness by Exxon and Captain Joseph Hazelwood for the “Exxon Valdez” disaster, allowing victims of the oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages.

1996: ‘Montana Freemen’ surrender, after an 81-day standoff, with FBI agents.

1997: Jurors, in Oklahoma City bombing trial, sentence Timothy McVeigh to death.

2002: The United States of America withdraws from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

2018: Antarctica is melting at an accelerating rate - 200 billion tonnes a year, 3 trillion tonnes in 25 years, in report published in "Nature" journal.
“Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017" ~ by the IMBIE team
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0179-y
2018: Volkswagen fined €1 billion (£880m) by German prosecutors, over diesel emissions scandal.

[GordMay]

June 14

1777: The Continental Congress approved the Stars and Stripes, designed by Francis Hopkinson, as the national flag of the United States.

1789: English Captain William Bligh, and 18 others, cast adrift from the HMS “Bounty”, seven weeks before, reach Timor [Tofua] in the East Indies, after traveling nearly 4,000 miles in a small, open boat.

1822: Charles Babbage proposes a "difference engine" in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables".

1839: First Henley Regatta held (it became the Henley Royal Regatta in 1851).

1919: John William Alcott and Arthur Whitten Brown take off, from St. John's, Newfoundland, for Clifden, Ireland, on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.

1928: Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara born.

1940: German forces occupy Paris.
1940: Auschwitz concentration camp opens, in Nazi controlled Poland, with Polish POWs (approx. 3 million would die within its walls).

1942: Anne Frank begins her diary.

1951: UNIVAC 1, the first computer built for commercial purposes [Census Bureau], is demonstrated in Philadelphia, by Dr. John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr.

1962: Albert DeSalvo, better known as the Boston Strangler, murders Anna Slesers, his first victim.

1952: Keel laid for 1st nuclear powered sub USS Nautilus (4th to be named Nautilus).

1982: The surrender of the large Argentine garrison, at Port Stanley, to the British military. concluded the 74-day Falkland Islands War, which was fought for the control of the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), and its dependencies.

2016: First mammal made extinct by human-induced climate change announced - the Bramble Cay melomys from Torres Strait, Australia.
➥ https://australian.museum/learn/aust...omys-rubicola/

2019: Petition to create world's first "time free zone", on Sommaroy island, which has complete daylight for 2 months, delivered to the Norwegian parliament. The campaign was, of course, less about actually becoming the world’s first time-free zone – and more about drawing tourists in to experience the majestic midnight sun phenomenon for themselves.

[GordMay]

June 15

0763 BC: Assyrians record a solar eclipse, that will be used to fix the chronology of Mesopotamian history.

1215: King John signs ‘Magna Carta’, at Runnymede, near Windsor, England.

1219: Dannebrog is the flag of Denmark, and the oldest national flag in the world. According to legend, it fell from the sky, during the Battle of Lyndanisse (now Tallinn) in Estonia, and turned the Danes' luck.

1643: Able Tasman returns to Batavia, after discovering Tasmania.

1667: 1st fully documented human blood transfusion is performed, by French physician, Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys, when a small amount of sheep blood is transfused into a 15-year old boy, who survives the procedure.

1741: Captain Vitus Bering leaves Petropavlovsk, sailing to America.

1775: George Washington, who would one day become the first American president, accepts an assignment to lead the Continental Army, as ‘commander in chief’.

1844: Charles Goodyear patents the vulcanization of rubber.

1846: Representatives of Great Britain and the United States sign the Oregon Treaty, which settles a long-standing dispute with Britain over who controlled the Oregon territory. The treaty established the 49th parallel, from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Georgia, as the boundary between the United States and British Canada.

1859: Pig War: Ambiguity in the Oregon Treaty leads to the "Northwestern Boundary Dispute", between U.S. and British/Canadian settlers.

1869: World's 1st plastic Celluloid is patented, by John Wesley Hyatt, Albany, NY.

1876: Tsunamis, after earthquake, floods NE coast of Japan, kills 28,000.

1878: World's first moving pictures caught on camera (used 12 cameras, each taking 1 picture), by Eadweard Muybridge. Done to see if all 4 of a horse's hooves leave the ground. The images showed that a horse sometimes has all 4 feet off the ground simultaneously.

1896: Tsunami strikes Shinto festival, on beach at Sanriku, Japan; 27,000 are killed, 9,000 injured and 13,000 houses destroyed.

1904: Fire on riverboat “General Slocum” leaves more than 1,000 dead, mostly German-Americans.

1907: Researcher George Soper publishes the results of his investigation into recent typhoid outbreaks, in the New York area, and announces that Mary Mallon [Typhoid Mary] is the likely source of the outbreak.

1910: Robert Falcon Scott’s ship, the “Terra Nova”, sets sail from Cardiff, Wales, bound for Antarctica. Though it will succeed in reaching its objective, the expedition will end in tragedy as Scott and his companions give up their lives in order to become the second party to reach the South Pole.

1911: Tabulating Computing Recording Corporation (IBM) is incorporated.

1946: The United States presents the ‘Baruch Plan’, for the international control of atomic weapons, to the United Nations. The failure of the plan to gain acceptance resulted in a dangerous nuclear arms race, between the United States and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War.

1965: Bob Dylan records single ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (#1 in Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time").

2006: Construction on Global Seed Vault begins, on the remote island of Spitsbergen, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The vault, which now has the capacity to hold 2.25 billion seeds, is intended to “provide insurance against both incremental and catastrophic loss of crop diversity.”

2018: Physicist Stephen Hawking's ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, London, between the remains of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

2020: New COVID-19 cluster, of more than 100 cases, in Beijing, called a 'significant event' by WHO.

[GordMay]

June 16

1686 BCE: Hammurabi the Great dies, in Babylon.

0455: Rome is sacked, by the Vandal army.

1723: Scottish philosopher, economist Adam Smith born.

1903: Roald Amundsen commences the first east-west navigation of the Northwest Passage, by leaving Oslo, Norway.
1903: The Ford Motor Company was founded ,by Henry Ford, and 11 associate investors.

1961: Rudolf Nureyev, the world renowned dancer, from the Soviet Union's Kirov Opera Ballet Company, defects to West, at Le Bourget Airport, in Paris.

1963: Soviet cosmonaut Valentina V. Tereshkova became the first woman to travel in space, having been launched into orbit, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6, which completed 48 orbits in 71 hours.

1967: 50,000 attend first day of the Monterey International Pop Festival, beginning the ‘Summer of Love’. The three-day concert event featured historic performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Ravi Shankar, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, The Steve Miller Band, The Blues Project, The Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, The Byrds, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead.

1977: Oracle Corporation is incorporated, in Redwood Shores, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL), by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates.

2012: Liu Yang became the first Chinese woman in space, when she, and two other crew members, were launched, aboard the spacecraft Shenzhou 9.

2010: Bhutan banned the cultivation, harvesting, production, and sale of tobacco and tobacco products. It is still legal, in the South Asian country, to smoke in a private setting, but obtaining tobacco products legally is close to impossible.

2015: TV personality, and Real estate mogul, Donald Trump launches his campaign for the Republican nomination for US President, at Trump Towers.

[GordMay]

June 17

1579: During his circumnavigation of the world, English seaman Francis Drake anchors in a harbor [Drake’s Bay] just north of present-day San Francisco, California, and claims the territory for Queen Elizabeth I. Calling the land “Nova Albion,” Drake remained on the California coast for a month to make repairs to his ship, the Golden Hind, and prepare for his westward crossing of the Pacific Ocean.

1631: Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Mughal emperor Shah Jahān, died during childbirth, and in her memory he built the Taj Mahal, the most famous building in India.

1850: Paddle-wheeler "G P Griffith" burns off Mentor, Ohio (206 die).

1885: The dismantled Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of America, arrives in New York Harbor, aboard French ship “Isere”, after being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in 350 individual pieces packed in more than 200 cases.

1894: 1st US poliomyelitis epidemic breaks out, in Rutland, Vermont.

1896: Polar explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Frederick Jackson meet, by chance, in Franz Josef Land, the Arctic.

1928: Amelia Earhart leaves Newfoundland, to become 1st woman to fly Atlantic, as a passenger, in a plane piloted by Wilmer Stultz.

1939: Last public guillotining in France. Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is guillotined in Versailles, outside the prison Saint-Pierre.

1944: Iceland dissolves its union with Denmark, and declares itself a Republic.

1954: CIA exile army lands in Guatemala. Organised by John Foster Dulles, and United Fruit Co.

1967: China becomes world's 4th thermonuclear power, by exploding a hydrogen bomb.

1972: Five men are arrested, for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, at the ‘Watergate’, an office-hotel-apartment complex in Washington, D.C. In their possession were burglary tools, cameras and film, and three pen-size tear gas guns. At the scene of the crime, and in rooms the men rented at the Watergate, sophisticated electronic bugging equipment was found. Three of the men were Cuban exiles, one was a Cuban American, and the fifth was James W. McCord, Jr., a former CIA agent.

1978: Jimmy Buffett's "Cheeseburger In Paradise", peaks at #32, on US charts.

1987: With the death of the last individual, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow becomes extinct.

1988: Microsoft releases MS DOS 4.0.

1991: South Africa abolishes last of its apartheid laws.

1994: American gridiron football hero, O.J. Simpson, was charged with the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

2012: African American construction worker Rodney King, whose videotaped beating, by white Los Angeles Police Department officers, in March 1991 (and the officers' subsequent treatment by the courts), sparked violent race riots, was found dead in his swimming pool, in California.

2017: Collision at sea, between U.S.S. “Fitzgerald” and “ACX Crystal”, a Philippine cargo ship, kills 7 US sailors, in Japanese waters.
2017: Forest fires in Pedrógão Grande, Portugal begin, kill 62 people, more than 1,600 firefighters fight 156 fires.

2018: World electric speed record broken, by Jaguar Vector V20E, in battery-powered boat, at 88.61 mph (142.60 kph) Coniston Water, English Lake District.

2020: First major breakthrough in treating COVID-19. using steroid dexamethasone, announced by Oxford University.
OOPS - Yesterday ➥ https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-06-16...-complications

[GordMay]

June 18

0618: Coronation of the Chinese governor Li Yuan, as Emperor Gaozu of Tang, the new Emperor of China, initiating three centuries of the Tang Dynasty's rule over China.

0860: Rus Vikings attack Constantinople.

1767: Samuel Wallis, an English sea captain, sights Tahiti, considered the first European to reach the island.

1812: U.S. President James Madison signed a declaration of war, against Great Britain [& Canada], initiating the War of 1812, which arose chiefly from U.S. grievances over oppressive maritime practices, during the Napoleonic Wars.

1815: At Waterloo, in Belgium, Napoleon Bonaparte suffers defeat, at the hands of the Duke of Wellington, and Leberecht von Blücher, bringing an end to the [23 year] Napoleonic era, of European history.

1847: American photographer Thomas Martin Easterly takes the earliest known photograph of lightning, using the daguerreotype process, in St. Louis, Missouri.

1928: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen died.

1940: Winston Churchill's "this was their finest hour" speech, urging perseverance during Battle of Britain, delivered to British House of Commons.

1942: Paul McCartney born.

1948: Columbia Records publicly unveiled its new long-playing phonograph record, the 33 1/3, in New York City.

1979: Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT-II agreement, dealing with limitations and guidelines for nuclear weapons. The treaty, which never formally went into effect, proved to be one of the most controversial U.S.-Soviet agreements of the Cold War.

1980: Indian "human computer", Shakuntala Devi sets a world record, by mentally multiplying two random 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds; She correctly answered that 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 = 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730.

1981: Vaccine, to prevent hoof & mouth disease, announced.

1996: Ted Kaczynski, suspected of being the Unabomber, is indicted on ten criminal counts.

2003: Google launches AdSense, a program that enables website publishers to serve ads, targeted to the specific content of their individual web pages.

2008: The city council of Florence, in Italy, called for the poet Dante Alighieri to be readmitted into the city, at a public ceremony, after being exiled for over seven hundred years. The ceremony, honoring his descendants, would mark the formal revocation of the exile order, made against Dante in 1302, for his differing political views.

2010: Fifty-eight year old Reid Stowe returned to land, after claiming to spend the longest time at sea, without touching land. His record breaking trip lasted 1,152 days, and began in April 2007. He originally set out, with his girlfriend, but she had to leave, after suspecting that she was pregnant. Stowe was greeted by her and his nearly two year old child, who he had never seen.

2012: The US's IBM Sequoia supercomputer overtook Fujitsu's K Computer, in Japan, to become the fastest in the world. The development marks the first time, in two years, that the United States held the position.

2020: Canadian coronavirus COVID-19 known cases pass 100,000, with 8,361 deaths.

[GordMay]

June 19

0240: Eratosthenes estimates the circumference of Earth [at about about 250,000 stadia, 46,250 kilometers, 28,735 miles]. The Earth is now known to measure about 24,900 miles around the equator, slightly less around the poles.
Angle of shadow in Alexandria ÷ 360 degrees = Distance between Alexandria and Syene ÷ Circumference of Earth
➥ https://www.aps.org/publications/aps...06/history.cfm

1588: Spanish Armada heavily destroyed in storm, at Coruna.

1770: Emanuel Swedenborg reports the completion of the Second Coming of Christ, in his work “True Christian Religion”.

1816: Battle [massacre] of Seven Oaks, between North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company, near Winnipeg, Manitoba.

1864: USS “Kearsarge” sinks CSS “Alabama”, off Cherbourg Harbor, France. During its career, the “Alabama” captured 66 ships, and was hunted by more than 20 Federal warships.

1865: Union General Gordon Granger declares slaves are free in Texas, now the date the end of slavery is celebrated across the US, as ‘Juneteenth’.

1867: Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, installed as emperor of Mexico by French Emperor Napoleon III in 1864, is executed on the orders of Benito Juarez, the president of the Mexican Republic.

1893: Following a trial, that was a national sensation in the United States, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother.

1903: American automobile-racing driver, Barney Oldfield, accomplished the first mile-a-minute performance, in a car, at Indianapolis, Indiana.

1913: ‘Natives Land Act, Act No 27', passed in South Africa: confines Africans to hopelessly overcrowded reserves [less than 10 percent of the country's total area], and deprives them of rights to purchase land outside the native reserves.

1931: 1st photoelectric cell installed commercially, in West Haven, Connecticut.

1944: In what would become known as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot”, U.S. carrier-based fighters decimate the Japanese Fleet, with only a minimum of losses, in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death, becoming the first American civilians to be executed, for espionage.
1964: US Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes, 73-27.

1987: US Supreme Court rules schools teaching evolution, need not teach creation.

1991: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar surrenders to police.

2012: A man is beheaded, for witchcraft and sorcery, in Saudi Arabia.

2017: ‘Brexit’ negotiations begin, between United Kingdom and the European Union, in Brussels.

2018: US ambassador Nikki Haley announces the US is leaving the UN Human Rights Council.
2018: Canada's Senate votes to legalize recreational marijuana use, first major economy to do so.
2018: General Electric is dropped form the Dow Jones Index, the last original member from 1907.

2019: UN says over 70 million people in the world are displaced, asylum seekers, or refugees around the world, their highest-ever number, in 70 years.

[GordMay]

June 20

1214: The University of Oxford receives its charter.

1756: 146 British soldiers, Anglo-Indian soldiers, and Indian civilians are imprisoned in a small dungeon in Calcutta [the Black Hole of Calcutta], India, where most die from suffocation and heat exhaustion.

1793: Eli Whitney applies for a cotton gin patent.

1819: The paddle-wheel steamship “Savannah” arrives in Liverpool, England, after a voyage of 27 days and 11 hours. It’s the first steamship to successfully cross any ocean [the Atlantic].

1840: Samuel Morse patents his telegraph.

1867: US President Andrew Johnson announces the Alaska Purchase.

1894: French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin discovers bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague, in Hong Kong [Yersinia pestis named in his honor].

1943: ‘Pingualuit Crater’ [then called Chubb Crater] discovered in northern Quebec (3½ km diameter).

1944: US Congress charters Central Intelligence Agency.

1963: The hotline between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was established following Cuban Missile Crisis. Contrary to popular belief, communications between the two superpowers occurred via teletype or fax, and today, via email.

1967: Mohammed Ali [Cassius Clay] sentenced to 5 years, after 21 minutes of deliberation by jury, for refusing to be inducted into the armed forces, during the Vietnam War.

1990: Asteroid ‘Eureka’ is discovered.

2020: Highest-ever temperature recorded in the Arctic circle, 38C (100F) in Verkhoyansk, Siberia.

[GordMay]

The Summer Solstice will take place today, on June 20, 2021, at 03:32 UTC*, when the sun reaches its most northerly point, directly overhead at the Tropic of Cancer (23 degrees 27 minutes north latitude).
The summer solstice is the longest day [longer than 12 hours] of the year, and marks the beginning of summer, in the Northern Hemisphere. However, in meteorology, for example, summer begins on June 1.
Meanwhile, south of the equator, winter will begin, with days shorter than 12 hours.

* UTC to Your Local ➥ https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essen...niversal-time/

[GordMay]

June 21

0068: Roman General Vespasian conquers Jericho, during the Great Jewish Revolt.

1527: Italian historian, philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli dies.

1611: English explorer Henry Hudson, who earlier had tried to discover a short route from Europe to Asia, through the Arctic Ocean, was set adrift with his son, and seven others, in Hudson Bay, by mutineers.

1633: Accused of heresy by the Inquisition, Galileo was forced to recant his support of the Copernican system, which held that the Sun was the centre of the solar system.

1749: Town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, is founded by the British, Sparks Father Le Loutre's War.

1788: US Constitution comes into effect, when New Hampshire is the 9th state to ratify it. On 1787-09-17 The US Constitution is signed by delegates at the Philadelphia Convention. On 1787-12-07 Delaware is the 1st state to ratify the US constitution. 1789-03-04 1st US Congress meets and declares constitution in effect (9 senators, 13 reps).

1815: Napoleon abdicated as French emperor, for the second time.

1893: The first Ferris wheel (invented by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., a Pittsburgh-based engineer) made its debut, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

1895: The Kiel Canal is opened by German Emperor Wilhelm II. The 98 km (61 mi) long canal, in Northern Germany, is one of the world's busiest artificial waterways. It connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea.

1919: The German Navy, feeling betrayed by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, scuttles most of its ships interned at Great Britain's Scapa Flow Naval base, in the Orkney Islands. In all, 52 ships [of 74] were sunk.

1940: The first successful west-to-east navigation of Northwest Passage begins at Vancouver, British Columbia.

1941: Germany violated the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, and attacked the Soviet Union, during World War II.

1948: 1st stored computer program runs, on Manchester Mark I, at a laboratory in Manchester University, England.

1956: Anti-protons detected in the atmosphere.

1964: 3 civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, are killed by a Ku Klux Klan mob, near Meridian, Mississippi.

1969: In Cleveland, the severely polluted Cuyahoga River caught on fire, when an oil slick floating on the surface ignited; although it was not the first fire on the river, the incident garnered national attention, and led to antipollution measures, that substantially improved the river's condition.

1978: Charon, the largest moon of Pluto, was discovered.

1982: John Hinckley found not guilty of 1981 attempted assassination of President Reagan, by reason of insanity, and was committed to psychiatric care, until his release in September 2016.

1990: An earthquake near the Caspian Sea in Iran kills an estimated 50,000 and injures another 135,000 people. An estimated 400,000 people were left homeless by the 7.7-magnitude earthquake. A 20,000-square-mile area, in the provinces of Zanjan and Gilan was absolutely devastated. Additionally, a burst dam in Rasht, caused by a 6.5-magnitude aftershock, the following morning, wiped out a large stretch of farmland.

1993: English mathematician Andrew Wiles proves last theorem of Fermat.

2004: “SpaceShipOne” becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve space flight. The spaceplane reached an altitude of just over 100 kilometers (62 miles). Mike Melvill was the pilot , and only occupant.

2006: Pluto's newly discovered moons are officially named Nix and Hydra.

2009: Greenland became self-governing, as an expanded home-rule agreement with Denmark took effect.

2020: WHO records a new record number of new daily cases of COVID-19, 183,020, with 116,000 coming from North and South America.
2020: Saudi Arabia bans international visitors, from making the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage in 2020, due to COVID-19.
2020: New archaeological discovery announced near Stonehenge, of a large circle of shafts, surrounding a village, circa 2500 BC, largest prehistoric structure in Britain.
2020: Kurt Cobain's guitar, used during Nirvana's MTV Unplugged show, sells for a record $6 million.

[GordMay]

June 22

1596: Cornelis de Houtman’s fleet reaches Banten Java.

1675: Royal Greenwich Observatory, established in England, by Charles II.

1772: Slavery is outlawed in England [Somerset v Stewart court case].

1807: British seamen board the USS “Chesapeake”, a provocation leading to the War of 1812.

1825: British Parliament abolishes feudalism and the seigneurial system, in British North America.

1865: The CSS “Shenandoah” fires the last shot of the American Civil War, in the Bering Strait, to indicate surrender.

1887: English biologist Julian Huxley born.

1910: German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich announces a definitive cure for syphilis.

1936: Virgin Islands receives a constitution from US [Organic Act].

1940: France surrenders to Nazi Germany, with the northern half of the country occupied, and the south established as the Nazi client state, Vichy France.

1941: Under the code-name ‘Barbarossa’, Germany invades the Soviet Union, in the largest military operation in history.

1954: US Congress passes revised organic act , for Virgin Islands

1981: Mark David Chapman pleads guilty to killing John Lennon.

2008: George Carlin dies.