TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JUNE 11
1184 BC Trojan War: Troy is sacked and burned, according to calculations by Eratosthenes
1346 Charles IV of Luxembourg is elected Holy Roman Emperor.
1509 King Henry VIII married his first wife, Katharine of Aragon.
1770 Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
1776 Continental Congress creates committee (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston) to draft a Declaration of Independence
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.
1959 Christopher Cockerell first presents the hovercraft
1963 Vivian Malone and James Hood successfully enrolled at the University of Alabama following Gov. George Wallace’s famous “stand in the schoolhouse door.”
1977 In the Netherlands, a 19-day hostage situation came to an end when Dutch marines stormed a train and a school being held by South Moluccan extremist. Two hostages and the six terrorists were killed.
1982 Steven Spielberg’s movie “E.T.” opened.
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 was executed by lethal injection for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
2014 Islamic State of Iraq forces seize control of government offices and other important buildings in the northern city of Mosul
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
