June 8
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.
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.
2004: The first Transit of Venus in modern history took place. The previous one was in 1882.
June 9
1650: The Harvard Corporation was established. It was the first legal corporation in the Americas.
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.
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!”.
June 10
1854: The first class of United States Naval Academy students graduated.
1935: Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in Akron, Ohio, by Dr. Robert Smith and Bill Wilson.
1944: Fifteen-year-old Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team became the youngest player ever in a major-league game.
1947: Saab produced its first automobile.
1977: The Apple II, one of the first personal computers, went on sale.
2001: Pope John Paul II canonized Lebanon’s first female saint, Saint Rafqa.
2007: Novelty dance song “I’m a Gummy Bear” by German band Gummibär released.
2019: New DNA research on grapes shows one French wine Savagnin Blanc has been grown for 900 years in Jura published in “Nature Plants”.
June 11
1776: The Continental Congress appointed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston to the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence.
1805: A fire consumed large portions of Detroit in the Michigan Territory.
1962: Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin become the only prisoners to escape from the federal prison on Alcatraz Island. No trace of them was ever found and they were presumed to have drowned.
1998: Compaq Computer paid $9 billion for Digital Equipment Corporation in the largest high-tech acquisition.
2019: “The New York Times” reveals an estimated 500,000 song titles, including masters of Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, lost in 2008 warehouse fire on Universal backlot in Los Angeles.
June 12
1665: England installed a municipal government in the former Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam and renamed it New York City.
1987: At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, West Germany, President Ronald Reagan publicly challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.
2018: AT&T’s $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner can go ahead according to US district court judge.
2019: Earliest evidence of humans smoking cannabis discovered in 2,500-year-old grave in Pamir Mountains, China, published in “Science Advances”.
June 13
1927: Aviator Charles Lindbergh received a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City.
1966: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
1983: Pioneer 10 became the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passed beyond the orbit of Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun at the time.
1994: A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blamed recklessness by Exxon and Captain Joseph Hazelwood for the Exxon Valdez disaster, allowing victims of the oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages.
1996: The Montana Freemen surrendered after an 81-day standoff with FBI agents.
June 14
1775: The Continental Army was established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the United States Army.
1777: The Stars and Stripes was adopted by Congress as the flag of the United States.
1789: Whiskey distilled from corn was first produced by American clergyman the Rev Elijah Craig; the concoction was named Bourbon because Rev. Craig lived in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
1937: Pennsylvania became the first (and only) state to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday.
1954: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill into law that placed the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance.
1959: Disneyland Monorail System, the first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere, opened to the public in Anaheim, California.
2015: “Jurassic World”, 1st film to make $500 million worldwide in its opening weekend.