Battle of Dyrrhachium
48 BC Battle of Dyrrhachium: Julius Caesar barely avoids a catastrophic defeat to Pompey near the city of Dyrrachium (in what is now Albania)
Lady Godiva
1040 Lady Godiva rides naked on horseback through Coventry, according to legend, to force her husband, the Earl of Mercia, to lower taxes
Treaty of Calais
1520 King Charles V France and King Henry VIII of England sign Treaty of Calais
Siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré
1627 English fleet under George Villiers reach La Rochelle [NS=June 20]
- 1629 1st non-Separatist Congregational Church in US founded (Salem, Massachusetts)
Battle at Langport
1645 Battle at Langport, Somerset: Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army beats Royalists
Bonnie Prince Charlie Flees
1746 Scotland's Bonnie Prince Charlie flees in disguise to Isle of Skye
Music History
1762 Louis-François Roubiliac's monument to George Frideric Handel is unveiled at Westminster Abbey in London, England [1]
Event of Interest
1775 Horatio Gates issues order excluding blacks from Continental Army
Event of Interest
1780 The comte de Rochambeau and his French force of 7,000 land at Newport, Rhode Island, to join the American Revolutionary War
Scientific Discovery
1796 Carl Friedrich Gauss discovers that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers
- 1800 The British Indian Government establishes the Fort William College to promote Urdu, Hindi and other vernaculars of sub continent
- 1806 The Vellore Mutiny is the first instance of a mutiny by Indian sepoys against the British East India Company
- 1832 President Jackson vetoed legislation to re-charter 2nd Bank of US
Event of Interest
1847 Urbain Le Leverrier and John Couch Adams, co-discoverers of Neptune, meet for 1st time at home of John Herschel
Event of Interest
1850 Millard Fillmore sworn in as President of US (replacing Taylor)
- 1861 Lincoln writes to Kentucky's militia and says Union troops will not enter that state
Event of Interest
1862 US begins construction of Central Pacific Railroad
Event of Interest
1873 French poet Paul Verlaine (29) in a drunken, jealous rage, wounds protégé Arthur Rimbaud (18) with pistol, and gets sentenced to 2 years in jail
- 1877 The then villa of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, formally receives its city charter from the Royal Crown of Spain
- 1884 First day of Test Cricket at Old Trafford, Manchester (1st Test, England v Australia) is washed out
- 1886 George Goldie gets charter for Royal Niger Company
- 1890 Wyoming becomes 44th state of US (1st with female suffrage)
- 1898 Jean-Baptiste Marchands expedition reaches Fashoda at White Hippo
Event of Interest
1905 Dutch Queen Wilhelmina opens Technical Hague court
- 1908 H Kamerlingh Onnes makes helium liquid (-269°C)
- 1911 105°F (41°C) at North Bridgton, Maine (state record)
- 1912 Hannes Kolehmainen runs world record 5000m (14:36.6)
- 1913 Romania declares war on Bulgaria
- 1913 World's official highest recorded temperature at Greenland Ranch (now known as Furnace Creek Ranch), Death Valley, California at 134 °F (56.7 °C)
- 1915 British/South African troops march into German SW-Africa
Event of Interest
1917 Emma Goldman imprisoned for obstructing draft
Signing of the Treaty of Versailles
1919 US President Woodrow Wilson personally delivers Treaty of Versailles to Senate
Baseball Record
1920 Cleveland's future Baseball HOF outfielder Tris Speaker has his then record hitting streak of 11 stopped by Tom Zachary; Indians beat Washington Senators, 8-4 at Griffith Stadium
Event of Interest
1925 Jury selection takes place in US John T. Scopes evolution trial
- 1925 Meher Baba begins his silence of 44 years. His followers still observe Silence Day on this date in commemoration.
- 1925 USSR's official news agency TASS forms
- 1926 Lake Denmark, New Jersey arsenal explodes, kills 21, $75m damage
- 1928 Senator Milt Gaston hurls record tying 14-hit shutout
- 1929 Pittsburgh Pirates outslug Philadelphia Phillies, 15-9 at the Baker Bowl; 9 HRs hit, 1 in each inning - unique in MLB history
- 1929 US issues newer, smaller-sized paper currency
- 1932 Jack Burnett gets 9 hits, Eddie Rommel relieves in 2nd 18-17 victory in 18 as his A's beats Indians in longest relief job
- 1933 1st police radio system operated, Eastchester Township, NY
- 1936 109°F (43°C) Cumberland & Frederick, Maryland (state record)
- 1936 110°F (43°C) at Runyon, New Jersey (state record)
- 1936 111°F (44°C) Phoenixville, Pennsylvania (state record)
- 1936 112°F (44°C) at Martinsburg, West Virginia (state record)
- 1936 New Straits Convention allows Turkish re-armament of Dardanelles
Baseball Record
1936 Phillies Chuck Klein becomes 4th to hit 4 HRs in a game
Music History
1937 Belgian-Romani-French jazz guitarist'Django Reinhardt's "Quintette du Hot Club" 'debuts at La Grosse Pomme nightclub in Montmartre, Paris
- 1938 "Yankee Clipper" completes 1st passenger flight over Atlantic
Event of Interest
1938 Howard Hughes flies around the world in 91 hours
'Hitler Will Have to Break Us or Lose the War'
1940 Battle of Britain begins as Nazi forces attack shipping convoys in the English Channel
- 1941 Continuation War: Finland invades East Karelia as hostilities with the Soviet Union resume following the German invasion in June
- 1941 Jedwabne Pogrom: massacre of Jewish people living in and near the village of Jedwabne, Poland
- 1942 Netherlands government in exile (London) recognizes Soviet Union
- 1943 6th day of Battle of Kursk, USSR: Operation Citadel continues
- 1943 US, British and Canadian forces invade Sicily in WW II (Operation Husky)
Event of Interest
1944 "Father of Medicare" Tommy Douglas becomes the 7th Premier of Saskatchewan
Event of Interest
1947 Muhammad Ali Jinnah is recommended as the first Governor General of Pakistan by then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee
- 1948 Lydda Airfield captured by Israeli army
- 1949 1st practical rectangular TV tube announced in Toledo, Ohio
- 1949 WJAR TV channel 10 in Providence, Rhode Island (NBC) begins broadcasting
- 1950 "Your Hit Parade" premieres on NBC-TV (later CBS), after being broadcast on radio from 1935
- 1951 Armistice talks to end Korean conflict began at Kaesong
- 1956 650,000 US steel workers go on strike
- 1956 Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu, Mamelodi, east of Pretoria, South Africa, a soldier of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC
- 1956 US performs atmospheric nuclear test at Bikini Island
- 1958 1st parking meters installed in England (625 installed)
- 1958 Ex-king Norodom Sihanoek appointed premier of Cambodia
- 1960 Belgium sends troops to Congo
Event of Interest
1962 Martin Luther King Jr. arrested during demonstration in Georgia
- 1962 Telstar, 1st active communications satellite, launched, developed by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) [1]
- 1962 US performs atmospheric nuclear test at Christmas Island
- 1964 Jesús Alou is the first San Francisco Giant in 40 years to get 6 hits in a game in a 10-3 win over the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field
- 1964 Moïse Tshombé, leader of the Confederation of Tribal Associations of Katanga, becomes Prime Minister of the Congo
- 1964 The Beatles release "A Hard Day's Night", their 3rd studio album
- 1965 Beatles' "VI" album goes #1 & stays #1 for 6 weeks
- 1965 Rolling Stones score their 1st US #1 single "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"
- 1967 Bobbie Gentry records "Ode to Billie Joe" - single goes on to win 4 Grammys
- 1967 Uruguay becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty
- 1968 US Major League baseball announces it will split into 2 divisions for 1969
- 1969 Chilean Association of Librarians created
British Golf Open
1971 100th British Open Men's Golf, Royal Birkdale: Lee Trevino wins the first of his consecutive Open Championships, a stroke ahead of Lu Liang-Huan of Taiwan
Event of Interest
1971 National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) founded in US by women including Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Myrlie Evers-Williams and Gloria Steinem
- 1972 Democratic convention opens in Miami Beach Florida (McGovern)
- 1972 Herd of stampeding elephants kills 24, Chandka Forest India
- 1973 Bahamas declares Independence from the United Kingdom and adopts constitution
- 1973 John Paul Getty III, grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, is kidnapped in Rome by Italian gangsters wanting a ransom
- 1974 OPEC ends oil boycott against Netherlands
- 1974 USSR performs nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan
Gladys Knight and The Pips
1975 Gladys Knight and Pips Summer Series premieres on NBC-TV
Cricket Debut
1975 Test Cricket debut of Graham Gooch, v Australia, out for a pair
Film & TV History
1978 World News Tonight premieres on ABC with Max Robinson the first black anchor on a network newscast in the US
Music History
1979 Chuck Berry begins 4 months term in prison for $200,000 in tax evasion
Escape from New York
1981 "Escape from New York" directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell and Donald Pleasence, premieres in the US
- 1981 CERN achieves 1st proton-antiproton beam collision (570 GeV)
- 1981 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
- 1981 Walt Disney's "Fox & The Hound" released
- 1982 Miguel Vasquez makes 1st public quadruple somersault on trapeze
- 1982 Rangers Larry Parrish hits his 3rd grand slam of the week
Event of Interest
1982 Samuel Morse's "Gallery of the Louvre" sells for $3,250,000
- 1984 Prolific studio drummer Jim Gordon convicted of murdering his mother and sentenced 16 years to life in prison. Diagnosed with schizophrenia after the killing, he is serving time in a medical / psychiatric prison, and has been denied parole 10 times as of 2018. [1]
- 1985 Coca-Cola Co announces it will resume selling old formula Coke
The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
1985 French foreign intelligence agents blow up the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor, New Zealand to prevent it interfering with French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira is killed.
- 1989 Paula Ivan runs female world record 1 mile (4:15.61)
Film & TV History
1990 Andrew Dice Clay cries on Arsenio Hall Show
Cricket History
1990 Final day of Test Cricket for Richard Hadlee as New Zealand go down by 114 runs in 3rd Test v England at Edgbaston
Election of Interest
1991 Boris Yeltsin sworn in as 1st elected President of the Russian Federation
- 1991 Foreign Minister R.F. Botha of South Africa signs accession to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty on behalf of South Africa
- 1991 L'Express Airlines Beechcraft C-99 crashes in Alabama, killing 13
- 1992 Spaceship Giotto (Halley 1986) approaches comet Grigg-Skjellerup
- 1992 SuriPop VII, Suriname Popular Song Festival
- 1992 US Major Soccer League folds after 14 seasons
- 1993 Melchior Ndadaye becomes 1st Hutu Burundi President, Sylvie Kinigi Prime Minister
- 1993 Yobes Ondieki runs world record 10km (26:58.38)
- 1994 Nepal Prime Minister Girija Prasadkoirala resigns
- 1994 Sonia O'Sullivan runs female world record 2K (5:25.36)
- 1997 Hideki Irabu makes MLB debut as a NY Yankee, beats Tigers 10-3
Murder of Interest
1997 Louise Woodward's trial begins in Massachusetts Nanny murder trial
- 1997 RJR Nabisco announces it will replace Joe Camel in new ads
- 1997 Spain, Partido Popular member Miguel Ángel Blanco is kidnapped in the Basque city of Ermua by ETA members, sparking widespread protests
- 1998 Roman Catholic sexual abuse cases: The Diocese of Dallas agrees to pay $23.4 million to nine former altar boys who claimed they were sexually abused by former priest Rudolph Kos
- 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup Final, Rose Bowl, Pasadena, CA: US beats China, 5-4 on penalties; 0-0 a.e.t; US second World Cup
- 2000 A leaking southern Nigerian petroleum pipeline explodes, killing about 250 villagers scavenging gasoline
- 2000 EADS, the world's second largest aerospace group is formed by the merger of Aérospatiale-Matra, DASA, and CASA
- 2001 Amerada Hess agrees to acquire Triton Energy for $2.7 billion in cash
ESPY Awards
2002 10th ESPY Awards: Tiger Woods, Venus Williams win
- 2002 At a Sotheby's auction, Peter Paul Rubens' painting The Massacre of the Innocents is sold for £49.5million (US$76.2 million) to Kenneth, Lord Thomson
- 2003 Neoplan bus, owned by Kowloon Motor Bus, collides with a truck, falls off bridge on Tuen Mun Road, Hong Kong, and plunges into the underlying valley, killing 21 people. Deadliest Hong Kong traffic accident.
- 2005 Hurricane Dennis slams into the Florida Panhandle causing billions of dollars in damage
- 2006 Pakistan International Flight PK-688 crashes in Multan, Pakistan shortly after takeoff, killing all 45 people on board
- 2008 Former Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boškoski is acquitted of all charges by a UN Tribunal accusing him of war crimes
- 2011 British tabloid News of the World publishes its last edition after 168 years in the wake of a phone hacking scandal.
- 2012 The American Episcopal Church becomes the first to approve a rite for blessing gay marriages
- 2013 40 people are buried in landslides in Sichuan Province, China
- 2014 Yair Lapid warns of Israeli Defense Force ground operation if Gazan rocket fire do not stop
- 2015 23 people are killed & 50 are injured in a stampede at a free clothing drive in Mymensingh, Bangladesh
- 2015 Jason Koumas announces his retirement from professional football
- 2015 The Confederate flag is taken down for the last time from South Carolina Capitol grounds 1 day after the state legislature ordered it removed.
- 2017 NASA's Juno spacecraft makes closest ever pass over Jupiter's Great Red Spot at 9,000 kilometers overhead
- 2018 Original sketch of Winnie-the-Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood by EH Shepard sells for £430,000 in London, record price for a book illustration
Sports History
2018 Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo joins Italian champions Juventus in a deal worth £99.2m, becoming one of the four most expensive players of all time
- 2018 The final 4 boys and their coach are rescued from Tham Luang Nang Non cave, Thailand after being trapped there for 18 days by monsoon flooding
- 2019 British ambassador to the US Sir Kim Darroch resigns after his secret cables calling the US president "inept" were published
- 2019 Earliest evidence of modern humans outside Africa found with 210,000 year old skull from Apidima Cave, southern Greece published in "Nature"
Contract of Interest
2019 Kawhi Leonard signs with the Los Angeles Clippers to a reported three-year, $103 million contract
Music History
2019 Taylor Swift named the world's highest paid entertainer by Forbes earning $185 million in 2018
Hagia Sophia
2020 Sixth century cathedral Hagia Sophia turned into a mosque by decree issued by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (converted to a mosque 1453-1934)
Geoffrey Chaucer's Time-Off Request
2023 Fourteenth century document by a civil servant asking for time off identified as only known handwriting by Geoffrey Chaucer, the 'Father of English Literature' [1]
- 2023 More than 61,000 people died in European heatwaves in 2022, according to study published in "Nature Medicine", suggesting world not doing enough to counter increasing heatwaves [1]
- 2023 Torrential rains across New England and New York cause historic flooding, especially in Vermont's capital Montpellier affecting two million people, causing one death [1]
Biden Meets King Charles
2023 US President Joe Biden visits the UK, meeting King Charles III at Windsor Castle and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Downing Street [1]
