TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: JUNE 16
0455 Rome is sacked by the Vandal army.
1487 The Battle of Stoke ended the Wars of the Roses.
1567 Mary Queen of Scots thrown into Lochleven Castle prison
1858 Abraham Lincoln, in accepting the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, declares that, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
1880 Salvation Army forms in London
1884 At Coney Island, in Brooklyn, NY, the first roller coaster in America opened.
1890 The second Madison Square Gardens opened.
1904 Events in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses took place on this day, which is celebrated as Bloomsday, for the main character, Leopold Bloom.
1910 The first Father’s Day is celebrated in Spokane, Washington
1935 President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation is passed by the House of Representatives.
1941 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the closure of all German consulates in the United States. The deadline was set as July 10.
1952 Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl is published in the United States.
1955 The U.S. House of Representatives votes to extend Selective Service until 1959.
1963 Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space
1967 The Monterey Pop Festival opens
1972 Ulrike Meinhof was captured by West German police in Hanover. She was co-founder of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group and the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion).
1976 In Soweto, thousands of school children revolted against the South African government’s plan to enforce Afrikaans as the language for instruction in black schools.
1977 Leonid Brezhnev is named president of the Soviet Union
1987 Subway gunman Bernhard Goetz acquitted on all but gun possession charges after shooting 4 black youths who tried to rob him
1992 U.S. President George H.W. Bush welcomed Russian President Boris Yeltsin to a meeting in Washington, DC. The two agreed in principle to reduce strategic weapon arsenals by about two-thirds by the year 2003.
1996 Russia voted in its first independent presidential election. Boris Yeltsin eventually won in a runoff.
1999 The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that a 1992 federal music piracy law does not prohibit a palm-sized device that can download high-quality digital music files from the Internet and play them at home.
2000 Israel complies with UN Security Council Resolution 425 after 22 years, which calls on Israel to completely withdraw from Lebanon. Israel withdraws from all of Lebanon, except the disputed Sheba Farms
2004 The 9/11 Commission determined that Saddam Hussein had no strong links to al-Qaeda, contradicting White House beliefs.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
