TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JUNE 12
1099 Crusade leaders visited the Mount of Olives where they met a hermit who urged them to assault Jerusalem.
1665 England installed a municipal government in New York. It was the former Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam.
1812 Napoleon Bonaparte and his army invade Russia.
1838 The Iowa Territory was organized.
1849 The gas mask is patented by Lewis P. Haslett.
1901 Cuba agrees to become an American protectorate by accepting the Platt Amendment.
1920 Republicans nominate Warren G. Harding for president and Calvin Coolidge for vice president.
1921 President Warren Harding urges every young man to attend military training camp.
1926 Brazil quits the League of Nations in protest over plans to admit Germany.
1929 2000 Students on strike take over the main building of the Mexican National University. The students held hostages and put a red flag over the building. They demanded the university rector to resign, but he refused. Eventually the students let the hostages go, but they still kept guard over the building.
1931 Gangster Al Capone and 68 of his henchmen are indicted for violating Prohibition laws.
1935 U.S. Senator Huey Long of Louisiana made the longest speech on Senate record. The speech took 15 1/2 hours and was filled by 150,000 words.
1963 Black civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated by a gunman outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
1964 The leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, is jailed for life for sabotage.
1967 The Supreme Court rules that states cannot ban interracial marriages.
1975 Indira Gandhi , the prime minister of India, is found guilty of electoral corruption in her successful 1971 campaign. Gandhi refused to give up India’s top office and later declared martial law in the country when public demonstrations threatened to topple her administration.
1977 David Berkowitz gets 25 years to life for the Son of Sam murders in New York.
1982 75,000 people rallied against nuclear weapons in New York City’s Central Park. Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and Linda Ronstadt were in attendance.
1985 The U.S. House of Representatives approves $27 million in aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.
1987 Ronald Reagan challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”
1992 In a letter to the U.S. Senate, Russian Boris Yeltsin stated that in the early 1950’s the Soviet Union had shot down nine U.S. planes and held 12 American survivors.
1994 Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, and her friend Ron Goldman are brutally stabbed to death outside Nicole’s home in Brentwood, California. OJ Simpson was later tried for the murders and although the evidence against Simpson was extensive he was found not guilty.
2016 Mass Shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida Kills 49 People
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
