TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: JUNE 2
626 Incident at Xuanwu Gate: in fear of assassination, Li Shimin ambushes and kills his rival brothers Li Yuanji and Li Jiancheng
1644 Oliver Cromwell crushes the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor.
1776 Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the American colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States” was adopted by the Continental Congress.
1777 Vermont becomes 1st American colony to abolish slavery
1822 Denmark Vesey is executed in Charleston, South Carolina, for planning a massive slave revolt.
1823 Bahia Independence Day: the end of Portuguese rule in Brazil, with the final defeat of the Portuguese crown loyalists in the province of Bahia
1843 Alligator Falls Out of the Sky in Charleston, South Carolina during a thunderstorm.
1850 Benjamin Lane patented a gas mask with a breathing apparatus. (Patent US7476 A)
1858 Czar Alexander II frees the serfs working on imperial lands.
1863 The Union left flank holds at Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg.
1881 Charles J. Guiteau fatally wounds President James A. Garfield in Washington, D.C.
1885 Canada’s North-west Insurrection ends with surrender of Big Bear
1890 Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act. prohibits industrial monopolies
1926 Congress establishes the Army Air Corps.
1937 American aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan are heard for the last time before disappearing
1955 “Lawrence Welk Show” premiers on ABC
1961 Novelist Ernest Hemingway commits suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.
1962 Wal-Mart Discount City opened in Rogers, Arkansas. It was the first Walmart store.
1964 U.S. President Johnson signed the “Civil Rights Act of 1964” into law. The act made it illegal in the U.S. to discriminate against others because of their race.
1976 North and South Vietnam are officially reunified.
1980 President Jimmy Carter reinstates draft registration for males 18 years of age.
1982 Larry Walters using lawn chair & 42 helium balloons, rose to 16,000′
1990 1,426 pilgrims trampled to death after a panic in a tunnel in Mecca, Saudi Arabia
1998 Cable News Network (CNN) retracted a story that alleged that U.S. commandos had used nerve gas to kill American defectors during the Vietnam War.
2000 In Mexico, Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (PAN) defeated Francisco Labastida Ochoa of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the presidential election. The PRI had controlled the presidency in Mexico since the party was founded in 1929.
2001 World’s First Self-Contained Artificial Heart Transplant
2002 American businessman, Steve Fossett completes the first solo around-the-world Balloon Flight
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
