Battle of Dyrrhachium
48 BC Battle of Dyrrhachium: Julius Caesar barely avoids a catastrophic defeat to Pompey near the city of Dyrrachium (in what is now Albania)
1040 Lady Godiva rides naked on horseback through Coventry, according to legend, to persuade her husband, the Earl of Mercia, to lower taxes
Siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré
1627 English fleet under George Villiers reaches La Rochelle [NS = June 20]
- 1629 First non-Separatist Congregational Church in US founded in Salem, Massachusetts
Battle at Langport
1645 Battle at Langport, Somerset: Oliver Cromwell‘s New Model Army defeats Royalists
Event of Interest
1775 Horatio Gates issues order excluding Blacks from Continental Army
Event of Interest
1780 The Comte de Rochambeau and his French force of 7,000 land in Newport, Rhode Island, to join the American Revolutionary War
Scientific Discovery
1796 Carl Friedrich Gauss discovers that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers
- 1800 The British Indian Government establishes the Fort William College to promote Urdu, Hindi, and other vernaculars of the subcontinent
- 1806 The Vellore Mutiny is the first instance of a mutiny by Indian sepoys against the British East India Company
- 1832 President Jackson vetoes legislation to recharter the Second Bank of the US
Event of Interest
1847 Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, co-discoverers of Neptune, meet for first time at home of John Herschel
- 1861 Lincoln writes to Kentucky’s militia and says Union troops will not enter that state
Event of Interest
1873 French poet Paul Verlaine (29), in a drunken, jealous rage, wounds protégé Arthur Rimbaud (18) with pistol and gets sentenced to 2 years in jail
- 1877 The then villa of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, formally receives its city charter from the Royal Crown of Spain
- 1884 First day of Test Cricket at Old Trafford, Manchester (1st Test, England v Australia) is washed out
- 1886 George Goldie gets charter for Royal Niger Company
- 1890 Wyoming becomes 44th state of US, the first with female suffrage
- 1898 Jean-Baptiste Marchand’s expedition reaches Fashoda at White Nile
- 1908 H Kamerlingh Onnes makes helium liquid (-269°C)
- 1911 105°F (41°C) at North Bridgton, Maine (state record)
- 1912 Hannes Kolehmainen runs world record 5000 m (14:36.6)
- 1913 Romania declares war on Bulgaria
- 1913 World’s official highest recorded temperature at Greenland Ranch (now known as Furnace Creek Ranch), Death Valley, California at 134°F (56.7°C)
- 1915 British South African troops march into German South-West Africa
Baseball Record
1920 Cleveland’s future Baseball Hall of Fame outfielder Tris Speaker has his then-record hitting streak of 11 stopped by Tom Zachary; Indians beat Washington Senators 8-4 at Griffith Stadium
- 1925 Meher Baba begins his silence of 44 years. His followers still observe Silence Day on this date in commemoration.
- 1925 USSR’s official news agency TASS is formed
- 1926 Lake Denmark, New Jersey, arsenal explodes, killing 21 and causing $75 million in damage
- 1928 Senator Milt Gaston hurls record-tying 14-hit shutout
- 1929 Pittsburgh Pirates outslug Philadelphia Phillies 15-9 at Baker Bowl; 9 HRs hit, 1 in each inning – unique in MLB history
- 1929 US issues newer, smaller-sized paper currency
- 1932 Jack Burnett gets 9 hits, Eddie Rommel relieves in second 18-17 victory in 18 innings as his A’s beat Indians in longest relief job
- 1933 First police radio system operated in Eastchester Township, NY
- 1936 109°F (43°C) Cumberland and Frederick, Maryland (state record)
- 1936 110°F (43°C) at Runyon, New Jersey (state record)
- 1936 111°F (44°C) Phoenixville, Pennsylvania (state record)
- 1936 112°F (44°C) at Martinsburg, West Virginia (state record)
- 1936 New Straits Convention allows Turkish re-armament of Dardanelles
Baseball Record
1936 Phillies’ Chuck Klein becomes fourth player to hit four home runs in a game
Music History
1937 Belgian-Romani-French jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt‘s “Quintette du Hot Club” debuts at La Grosse Pomme nightclub in Montmartre, Paris
- 1938 “Yankee Clipper” completes first passenger flight over Atlantic
1940 Battle of Britain begins as Nazi forces attack shipping convoys in the English Channel
- 1941 Continuation War: Finland invades East Karelia as hostilities with the Soviet Union resume following the German invasion in June
- 1941 Jedwabne Pogrom: massacre of Jewish people living in and near the village of Jedwabne, Poland
- 1942 Netherlands government in exile in London recognizes Soviet Union
- 1943 Sixth day of Battle of Kursk, USSR: Operation Citadel continues
- 1943 US, British, and Canadian forces invade Sicily in WWII (Operation Husky)
Event of Interest
1944 “Father of Medicare” Tommy Douglas becomes the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan
Event of Interest
1947 Muhammad Ali Jinnah is recommended as the first Governor General of Pakistan by then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee
- 1948 Lydda Airfield captured by Israeli army
- 1949 First practical rectangular TV tube announced in Toledo, Ohio
- 1949 WJAR TV Channel 10 in Providence, Rhode Island (NBC) begins broadcasting
- 1950 “Your Hit Parade” premieres on NBC-TV (later CBS) after being broadcast on radio since 1935
- 1951 Armistice talks to end Korean conflict begin in Kaesong
- 1956 650,000 US steel workers go on strike
- 1956 US performs atmospheric nuclear test at Bikini Atoll
- 1958 Ex-king Norodom Sihanoek appointed premier of Cambodia
- 1958 First parking meters installed in England (625 installed)
- 1960 Belgium sends troops to Congo
- 1962 Telstar, first active communications satellite developed by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), is launched [1]
- 1962 US performs atmospheric nuclear test at Christmas Island
- 1964 Jesús Alou is the first San Francisco Giant in 40 years to get six hits in a game in a 10-3 win over the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field
- 1964 Moïse Tshombé, leader of the Confederation of Tribal Associations of Katanga, becomes Prime Minister of the Congo
- 1964 The Beatles release “A Hard Day’s Night”, their third studio album
- 1965 Beatles’ “VI” album goes to number 1 and stays at number 1 for 6 weeks
- 1965 Rolling Stones score their first US number 1 single “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
- 1967 Bobbie Gentry records “Ode to Billie Joe,” which goes on to win four Grammy awards
- 1967 Uruguay becomes a member of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
- 1968 US Major League Baseball announces it will be split into two divisions for 1969
- 1969 Chilean Association of Librarians created
1971 100th British Open Men’s Golf, Royal Birkdale: Lee Trevino wins the first of his consecutive Open Championships, a stroke ahead of Lu Liang-Huan of Taiwan
- 1972 Democratic Convention opens in Miami Beach, Florida (McGovern)
- 1972 Herd of stampeding elephants kills 24 in Chandaka Forest, India
- 1973 Bahamas declares independence from the United Kingdom and adopts constitution
- 1973 John Paul Getty III, grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, is kidnapped in Rome by Italian gangsters demanding a ransom
- 1974 OPEC ends oil boycott against Netherlands
- 1974 USSR performs nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeastern Kazakhstan
Gladys Knight and The Pips
1975 Gladys Knight & the Pips Summer Series premieres on NBC-TV
Cricket Debut
1975 Test cricket debut of Graham Gooch against Australia, out for a pair
Film & TV History
1978 World News Tonight premieres on ABC with Max Robinson as the first Black anchor on a network newscast in the US
Music History
1979 Chuck Berry begins 4-month prison term for $200,000 in tax evasion
- 1981 CERN achieves first proton-antiproton beam collision (570 GeV)
- 1981 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
- 1981 Walt Disney’s “Fox & The Hound” released
- 1982 Miguel Vasquez makes first public quadruple somersault on trapeze
- 1982 Rangers’ Larry Parrish hits his third grand slam of the week
Event of Interest
1982 Samuel Morse‘s “Gallery of the Louvre” sells for $3,250,000
- 1984 Prolific studio drummer Jim Gordon is convicted of murdering his mother and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Diagnosed with schizophrenia after the killing, he is serving time in a medical/psychiatric prison and has been denied parole 10 times as of 2018. [1]
- 1985 Coca-Cola Co announces it will resume selling old-formula Coke
1985 French foreign intelligence agents blow up the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor, New Zealand, to prevent it from interfering with French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira is killed.
- 1989 Paula Ivan runs female world record 1 mile (4:15.61)
Election of Interest
1991 Boris Yeltsin sworn in as the first elected President of the Russian Federation
- 1991 Foreign Minister R.F. Botha of South Africa signs accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on behalf of South Africa
- 1991 L’Express Airlines Beechcraft C-99 crashes in Alabama, killing 13
- 1992 Spaceship Giotto (Halley 1986) approaches comet Grigg-Skjellerup
- 1992 US Major Soccer League folds after 14 seasons
- 1993 Melchior Ndadaye becomes first Hutu Burundi President, and Sylvie Kinigi becomes Prime Minister
- 1993 Yobes Ondieki runs world record 10 km (26:58.38)
- 1994 Nepal Prime Minister Girija Prasadkoirala resigns
- 1994 Sonia O’Sullivan runs female world record 2 km (5:25.36)
- 1997 Hideki Irabu makes MLB debut as a NY Yankee, beats Tigers 10-3
Murder of Interest
1997 Louise Woodwards’ trial begins in Massachusetts nanny murder trial
- 1997 RJR Nabisco announces it will replace Joe Camel in new ads
- 1997 Spain, Partido Popular member Miguel Ángel Blanco is kidnapped in the Basque city of Ermua by ETA members, sparking widespread protests
- 1998 Roman Catholic sexual abuse cases: The Diocese of Dallas agrees to pay $23.4 million to nine former altar boys who claimed they were sexually abused by former priest Rudolph Kos
- 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final, Rose Bowl, Pasadena, CA: US beats China 5-4 on penalties; 0-0 a.e.t; US wins second World Cup
- 2000 A leaking southern Nigerian petroleum pipeline explodes, killing about 250 villagers scavenging gasoline
- 2000 EADS, the world’s second-largest aerospace group, is formed by the merger of Aérospatiale-Matra, DASA, and CASA
- 2001 Amerada Hess agrees to acquire Triton Energy for $2.7 billion in cash
- 2002 At a Sotheby’s auction, Peter Paul Rubens’ painting The Massacre of the Innocents is sold for £49.5 million (US$76.2 million) to Kenneth, Lord Thomson
- 2003 Neoplan bus owned by Kowloon Motor Bus collides with a truck, falls off a bridge on Tuen Mun Road, Hong Kong, and plunges into the underlying valley, killing 21 people, making it the deadliest traffic accident in Hong Kong
- 2005 Hurricane Dennis slams into the Florida Panhandle causing billions of dollars in damage
- 2006 Pakistan International Flight PK-688 crashes in Multan, Pakistan shortly after takeoff, killing all 45 people on board
- 2008 Former Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boškoski is acquitted of all charges by a UN Tribunal accusing him of war crimes
- 2011 British tabloid News of the World publishes its last edition after 168 years in the wake of a phone hacking scandal
- 2012 The American Episcopal Church becomes the first to approve a rite for blessing gay marriages
- 2013 40 people are buried in landslides in Sichuan Province, China
- 2014 Yair Lapid warns of Israeli Defense Force ground operation if Gazan rocket fire do not stop
Sports History
2015 Jason Koumas announces his retirement from professional football
- 2015 The Confederate flag is taken down for the last time from South Carolina Capitol grounds 1 day after the state legislature ordered its removal
- 2015 Twenty-three people are killed and fifty are injured in a stampede at a free clothing drive in Mymensingh, Bangladesh
- 2017 NASA’s Juno spacecraft makes closest-ever pass over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot at 9,000 kilometers overhead
- 2018 Original sketch of Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood by E.H. Shepard sells for £430,000 in London, a record price for a book illustration
Sports History
2018 Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo joins Italian champions Juventus in a deal worth £99.2 million, becoming one of the four most expensive players of all time
- 2018 The final four boys and their coach are rescued from Tham Luang Nang Non cave, Thailand, after being trapped there for 18 days by monsoon flooding
- 2019 British ambassador to the US Sir Kim Darroch resigns after his secret cables calling the US president “inept” were published
- 2019 Earliest evidence of modern humans outside Africa is found with 210,000-year-old skull from Apidima Cave, southern Greece, published in “Nature”
Contract of Interest
2019 Kawhi Leonard signs a reported 3-year, $103 million contract with the Los Angeles Clippers
Music History
2019 Taylor Swift named the world’s highest paid entertainer by Forbes earning $185 million in 2018
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Time-Off Request
2023 Fourteenth-century document by a civil servant asking for time off identified as only known handwriting by Geoffrey Chaucer, the “Father of English Literature” [1]
- 2023 More than 61,000 people die in European heatwaves in 2022, according to study published in “Nature Medicine”, suggesting world not doing enough to counter increasing heatwaves [1]
- 2023 Torrential rains across New England and New York cause historic flooding, especially in Vermont’s capital Montpellier, affecting two million people and causing one death [1]
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