TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: JUNE 28
1389 Ottomans defeat Serbian army in the bloody Battle of Kosovo, opening the way for the Ottoman conquest of Southeastern Europe
1770 Quakers open a school for blacks in Philadelphia
1778 Mary “Molly Pitcher” Hays McCauley, wife of an American artilleryman, carries water to the soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth.
1839 Cinque and other Africans are kidnapped and sold into slavery in Cuba.
1863 General George Meade replaces General Joseph Hooker three days before the Battle of Gettysburg.
1874 The Freedmen’s Bank, created to assist former slaves in the United States, closes. Customers of the bank lose $3 million.
1894 Labor Day became a federal holiday by an act of Congress.
1902 Congress passes the Spooner bill, authorizing a canal to be built across the Isthmus of Panama.
1905 Russian sailors mutiny aboard the battleship “Potemkin”
1914 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo by young Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip at 10.45, the casus belli of WWI
1919 Germany signs the Treaty of Versailles under protest.
1938 Congress creates the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure construction loans.
1964 Malcolm X founds the Organization for Afro-American Unity to seek independence for blacks in the Western Hemisphere.
1967 Israel formally declared Jerusalem reunified under its sovereignty following its capture of the Arab sector in the June 1967 war.
1969 A police raid of a gay tavern sparks a series of violent clashes. The Stonewall Riots in New York City marked the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States.
1971 Supreme Court overturns draft evasion conviction of Muhammad Ali
1976 The first women entered the U.S. Air Force Academy.
1978 The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the medical school at the University of California at Davis to admit Allan Bakke. Bakke, a white man, argued he had been a victim of reverse racial discrimination.
1996 The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, voted to admit women.
2000 Six-year-old Elián González returned to Cuba from the U.S. with his father. The child had been the center of an international custody dispute.
2001 Serbia handed over Slobodan Milosevic over to the UN war crimes tribunal.
2004 In Iraq, the United States transferred power back to the Iraqis two days earlier than planned.
2004 The U.S. resumed diplomatic ties with Libya after a 24-year break.
2004 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that enemy combatants could challenge their detention in U.S. Courts.
2010 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
