June 3
1888: The poem “Casey at the Bat,” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, was published in the San Francisco Examiner.
1889: The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States was completed, running 14 miles between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Ore.
1940: Franz Rademacher proposed plans to make Madagascar the “Jewish homeland,” an idea that had first been considered by 19th century journalist Theodor Herzl.
1988: Theodore Farabee, 43, of Libby, Mont., published his book A.D. 30: The Historian’s Account in which challenged many Christian traditions.
1989: The government of China sent troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square after seven weeks of occupation.
2018: Dead whale found with 17 pounds (80 pieces) of plastic in its stomach in Songkhla province, Thailand.
2019: Apple announces it is shutting down iTunes and replacing it with three different apps.
June 4
1783: The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrated their montgolfière (hot air balloon) in Paris.
1876: An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrived in San Francisco, Calif., via the first transcontinental railroad, 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.
1896: Henry Ford completed the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gave it a successful test run.
1917: The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded.
1974: During Ten Cent Beer Night, inebriated Cleveland Indians fans started a riot, causing the game to be forfeited to the Texas Rangers.
2018: Former US President Bill Clinton and James Patterson publish a thriller novel “The President is Missing” together.
2019: Professional gambler James Holzhauer’s 32-game winning steak ends on “Jeopardy” just short of Ken Jenning’s record $2.52m earnings.
June 5
1837: The city of Houston was incorporated in the Republic of Texas.
1956: Elvis Presley introduced his new single, “Hound Dog,” on The Milton Berle Show, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements.
1968: Robert F. Kennedy, a U.S. senator and brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after winning the California Democratic presidential primary election. He was 42. His assassin, Shirhan Bishara Sirhan, remains imprisoned in California.
1971: Health and longevity guru Jerome Rodale, 72, died during a filming of the Dick Cavett Show in New York. While Cavett was discussing politics with journalist Pete Hamill, Rodale’s head dropped to his chest and he let out what sounded like a snore. Cavett said, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?” There was no response—Rodale was dead. The show was never broadcast.
1981: The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that five people in Los Angeles, Calif., had a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turned out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS.
2012: The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, became the first U.S. governor to survive a recall election. The last transit of Venus of the 21st century began.
2018: Miss America pageant announces an end to its swimsuit competition.
2019: Average person ingests 50,000 pieces of microplastic a year and breathes in similar amount according to first-ever such study published in journal “Environmental Science and Technology”.
June 6
1799: Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death”) died in Virginia at age 63.
1816: The first of several summer snowstorms hit the northeastern United States, bringing the “Year Without a Summer.”
1833: President Andrew Jackson became the first president to ride on a train.
1844: The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was founded in London, England.
1932: The Revenue Act of 1932 was enacted, creating the first gas tax in the United States, at a rate of 1 cent per U.S. gallon sold.
1933: The first drive-in theater opened, in Camden, N.J.
1944: Allied forces launched “Operation Overlord” also known as D-Day, the largest military invasion in history, against Nazi Germany.
1985: The grave of “Wolfgang Gerhard” was opened in Embu, Brazil. The remains exhumed were later proven to be those of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death.” Mengele is thought to have drowned while swimming in February 1979.
2018: French man announced to have won France’s €1 million My Lottery for the second time in 2 years, with odds of 1 in 16 trillion.
2019: Amir Ohana becomes the first openly gay minister in Israel as acting justice minister.
June 7
1776: Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams and led to the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
1800: British explorer David Thompson reached the mouth of the Saskatchewan River in Manitoba.
1892: Benjamin Harrison became the first president of the United States to attend a baseball game.
1899: American temperance crusader Carrie Nation began her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.
1929: After three years of negotiations, the Lateran Treaty was ratified, bringing Vatican City into existence, surrounded by the city of Rome.
1940: The Norwegian government and royalty went into exile in London, after the invasion of Norway by Nazi Germany.
1942: Imperial Japanese soldiers began occupying the American Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska off of Alaska.
1965: The U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, effectively legalizing the use of contraception by married couples.
1971: The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
1977: Five hundred million people watched the first day of the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II on television.
1982: Priscilla Presley opened Graceland to the public in Memphis, Tenn. The bathroom where Elvis Presley died five years earlier was kept off-limits.
1990: Universal Studios Florida opened in Orlando.
1837: Alois Hitler, father of Adolf Hitler, was born Alois Schicklgruber in the village of Strones in the Waldviertel, a hilly forested area just north of Vienna, Austria. (Died 1903.)
2016: Colin Nathaniel Scott, 23, of Portland Ore., died in Yellowstone National Park after he left a designated boardwalk at Norris Geyser Basin and fell through the crust into a boiling acidic spring. No remains could be recovered.
2018: Mars Curiosity Rover finds organic matter, including methane, on Mars in studies published in journal “Science”.
2019: More than four million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015 due to its economic crisis according to the UN.
June 8
632: The prophet Mohammed died.
793: Vikings raided the abbey at Lindisfarne in Northumbria, regarded as the beginning of the Scandinavian invasion of England.
1789: James Madison introduced 12 proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution in the House of Representatives. By 1791, 10 of them were ratified by the state legislatures and became the Bill of Rights.
1845: Andrew Jackson, seventh president, died at the Hermitage near Nashville, Tenn.
1887: Herman Hollerith applied for U.S. patent #395,791 for the ‘Art of Applying Statistics,’ his punched-card calculator.
1906: President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, signed the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the president to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value.
1912: Carl Laemmle incorporated Universal Pictures in Hollywood, Calif.
1949: Celebrities Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were named in an FBI report as members of the Communist Party. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
1959: The USS Barbero and the United States Postal Service attempted the delivery of mail via Missile Mail. (It never caught on.)
1968: Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral was held at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.
1982: President Ronald Reagan became the first American chief executive to address a joint session of the British Parliament.
2004: The first Transit of Venus in modern history took place. The previous one was in 1882.
2017: US prisoner Richard Anthony Jones freed after 17 years in Roeland Park, Kansas when his lookalike discovered.
2018: World’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit, can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second, launched at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, by IBM and Nvidia.
June 9
A.D. 68: Roman Emperor Nero committed suicide, ending his 13-year reign.
1534: Jacques Cartier became the first European to discover the Saint Lawrence River.
1650: The Harvard Corporation was established. It was the first legal corporation in the Americas.
1732: James Oglethorpe was granted a royal charter for the colony of the future U.S. state of Georgia.
1856: Five hundred Mormons left Iowa City, Iowa, and headed west for Salt Lake City carrying their possessions in two-wheeled handcarts.
1870: Author Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations) died in Gad’s Hill Place, England.
1885: The Treaty of Tientsin was signed, ending the Sino-French War, with China eventually giving up Tonkin and Annam—most of present-day Vietnam—to France.
1915: William Jennings Bryan resigned as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State over a disagreement regarding the United States’ handling of the German sinking of the RMS Lusitania. 1924: In the second attempt to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared, possibly having first made it to the top. (Mallory’s frozen, mummified remains were found on May 1, 1999.)
1934: Donald Duck made his debut in The Wise Little Hen.
1959: The USS George Washington was launched; it was the first submarine to carry ballistic missiles.
1973: The race horse Secretariat won the Triple Crown.
1978: Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints overturned the 148-year Mormon church policy that excluded black men from the priesthood.
2015: Chris Heston of the San Francisco Giants becomes the first pitcher to throw a no-hitter in the 2015 MLB season.
2019: Ali Stroker becomes the first actress in a wheelchair to win a Tony award for musical “Oklahoma!”.