TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JUNE 11
1346 Charles IV of Luxembourg is elected Holy Roman Emperor.
1509 Henry VIII of England marries Catherine of Aragon.
1770 Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
1865 Major General Henry W. Halleck finds documents and archives of the Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia. This discovery will lead to the publication of the official war records.
1895 Charles E. Duryea receives the first U.S. patent granted to an American inventor for a gasoline-driven automobile.
1903 King Alexander and Queen Draga of Belgrade are assassinated by members of the Serbia army.
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.
1934 The Disarmament Conference in Geneva ends in failure.
1937 Soviet leader Josef Stalin began a purge of Red Army generals.
1955 More than 80 people die in the Le Mans car race disaster In one of history’s worst car racing accidents, Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes crashed into a crowd of spectators and burst into flames.
1959 Christopher Cockerell first presents the hovercraft The amphibious air-cushion vehicle first crossed the English Channel just weeks after Cockerell first demonstrated his prototype, the SR.N1
1963 Vivian Malone and James Hood successfully enrolled at the University of Alabama following Gov. George Wallace’s famous “stand in the schoolhouse door.”
1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested in Florida for trying to integrate restaurants.
1987 Margaret Thatcher wins her third consecutive term as Prime Minister.
1990 The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law that would prohibit the desecration of the American Flag.
1993 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people who commit “hate crimes” could be sentenced to extra punishment. The court also ruled in favor of religious groups saying that they indeed had a constitutional right to sacrifice animals during worship services.
1998 Mitsubishi of America agreed to pay $34 million to end the largest sexual harassment case filed by the U.S. government. The federal lawsuit claimed that hundreds of women at a plant in Normal, IL, had endured groping and crude jokes from male workers.
2001 Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber, was executed.
2003 Scientists have found the oldest known human fossilized skulls dated around 160,000 years old in the Afar region of Ethiopia.
2009 Stephen Tyrone Johns, a guard at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. was shot and killed by an eighty-eight year old man. The man opened fire on a crowd inside the museum before he was shot by police and taken into custody. The attacker was reported to be James von Brunn, a white supremacist who had been convicted of prior violent crimes and served time in prison.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
