1983 – Dr. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
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
1155 – Frederick I Barbarossa was crowned emperor of Rome.
1178 – Five monks at Canterbury report something exploding on the moon shortly after sunset (only known observation)
1429 – French forces defeated the English at the battle of Patay. The English had been retreating after the siege of Orleans.
1541 – Irish parliament selects Henry VIII of England as King of Ireland
1621 – The first duel in America took place in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts.
1667 – The Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames toward London.
1682 – English Quaker William Penn founds Philadelphia, in the Pennsylvania Colony
1812 – The War of 1812 began as the U.S. declared war against Great Britain. The conflict began over trade restrictions.
1815 – At the Battle of Waterloo Napoleon was defeated by an international army under the Duke of Wellington. Napoleon abdicated on June 22.
1817 – London’s Waterloo Bridge opened. The bridge, designed by John Rennie, was built over the River Thames.
1822 – Part of US-Canadian boundary determined
1864 – Battle of Petersburg: Ulysses S. Grant ends four days of assaults and begins a nine month siege
1873 – Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for attempting to vote for a U.S. President.
1918 – Allied forces on the Western Front began their largest counter-attack against the German army. (World War I)
1928 – Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean as she completed a flight from Newfoundland to Wales.
1940 – General Charles de Gaulle makes his first speech on the BBC to the French people, since arriving in London, an appeal to defy Nazi occupiers – regarded as the beginning of French Resistance during WWII
1940 – Winston Churchill’s “this was their finest hour” speech urging perseverance during Battle of Britain delivered to British House of Commons
1942 – The U.S. Navy commissioned its first black officer, Harvard University medical student Bernard Whitfield Robinson.
1945 – William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), fascist politician and Nazi propaganda broadcaster, charged with treason in England
1948 – The United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted its International Declaration of Human Rights.
1953 – Seventeen major league baseball records were tied or broken in a game between the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers.
1953 – Egypt was proclaimed to be a republic with General Neguib as its first president.
1959 – A Federal Court annulled the Arkansas law allowing school closings to prevent integration.
1959 – Governor of Louisiana Earl K. Long is committed to a state mental hospital; he responds by having the hospital’s director fired and replaced with a crony who proceeds to proclaim him perfectly sane
1963 – 3,000 blacks boycott Boston public school to protest de facto segregation
1968 – Supreme Court bans racial discrimination in sale and rental of housing
1972 – US Supreme Court, 5-3, confirms lower court rulings in Curt Flood case, upholding baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws
1979 – In Vienna, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) 2.
1981 – US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart retires
1982 – The U.S. Senate approved the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act for an additional twenty-five years.
1983 – Dr. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
1996 – Ted Kaczynski, suspected of being the Unabomber, is indicted on ten criminal counts
1998 – “The Boston Globe” asked Patricia Smith to resign after she admitted to inventing people and quotes in four of her recent columns.
2000 – In Algiers, Algeria, the foreign ministers of Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a preliminary cease-fire accord and agreed to work toward a permanent settlement of their two-year border war.
2009 – Greenland assumed control over its law enforcement, judicial affairs, and natural resources from the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenlandic became the official language
2013 – Russia passes a law banning foreign same-sex couples from adopting children
2014 – King Juan Carlos I of Spain abdicates the Spanish throne to make way for his son Felipe VI
2015 – 18 vigilantes are killed & 53 are injured after an accidental detonation of an explosive device in Monguno, Nigeria
2018 – US President Trump orders US military to set up sixth branch of the military – a space force
2019 – China has been forcefully harvesting organs from marginalized groups in prison camps on a significant scale according to International Tribunal in London
2019 – Sex-changing Australian bush tomato study published in journal “PhytoKeys” detailing how Solanum Plastisexum can change from male to female to hermaphrodite
2019 – Two 14 year-old boys become the youngest in Irish history to be convicted of murder when found guilty of the murder and sexual assault of a 14 year-old girl in Dublin
2020 – US Supreme Court rules the Obama-era Dreamers Program (DACA), enabling undocumented migrant children ability to study and work, can stay
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
