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 Henry VIII of England marries Catherine 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
1817 The first predecessor of the bicycle is demonstrated
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.
1937 Marx Brothers’ “A Day At The Races” released
1944 U.S. carrier-based planes attack Japanese airfields on Guam , Rota, Saipan and Tinian islands, preparing for the invasion of Saipan.
1955 More than 80 people die in the Le Mans car race disaster
1959 Christopher Cockerell first presents the hovercraft
1959 Postmaster General bans D.H. Lawrence’s book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested in Florida for trying to integrate restaurants.
1963 Vivian Malone and James Hood successfully enrolled at the University of Alabama following Gov. George Wallace’s famous “stand in the schoolhouse door.”
1973 After a ruling by the Justice Department of the State of Pennsylvania, women were licensed to box or wrestle.
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.
1987 Margaret Thatcher is 1st British Prime Minister in 160 years to win a third consecutive term
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.
2014 Islamic State of Iraq forces seize control of government offices and other important buildings in the northern city of Mosul
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
