This Day in History

[GordMay]

May 11

0330: Byzantium (Constantinople; now Istanbul) becomes the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.

0868: "The Diamond Sutra", the world's oldest surviving, and dated printed book, is printed in Chinese, and made into a scroll.

1678: French admiral Jean d'Estrees' fleet runs aground, on Aves-islands, Curacao.

1749: British parliament accepts ‘Consolidation Act’, to reorganise the Royal Navy.

1792: The Columbia River is discovered & named, by US Captain Robert Gray.

1800: French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck give a lecture, first outlining his theories of evolution, at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, in Paris, France.

1820: Launch of HMS “Beagle”, the ship that would later take a young Charles Darwin on his famous scientific voyage.

1862: Confederates scuttle the CSS “Virginia”, off Norfolk, Virginia.

1894: A six inch by eight inch gopher turtle, encased in ice, fell from a thunderstorm, at Bovina, MS.

1917: King George V grants ‘Royal Letters Patent’ to New Zealand.

1924: Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft and Benz & Cie begin their first joint venture (later merge into Mercedes-Benz).

1951: American engineer Jay Forrester applies for patent for computer core memory.

1960: Israeli Mossad agents capture Adolf Eichmann, in Buenos Aires.

1967: The Siege of Khe Sanh ends, with the base is still in American hands.

1979: ‘VisiCalc’ Given First Public Demonstration. Harvard MBA candidate Daniel Bricklin, and programmer Robert Frankston gave the first demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made a business machine of the personal computer, for the Apple II. VisiCalc (for visible calculator) automated the recalculation of spreadsheets. A huge success, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the first year.

1989: Kenya announces worldwide ban on ivory.

1997: IBM's chess-playing computer, ‘Deep Blue’, defeated Garry Kasparov, in the last game of a six-game match, to claim a 3.5–2.5 victory (it won two games and had three draws); it marked the first time a current world champion had lost a match to a computer, under tournament conditions.

2012: Chinese scientists break world record, by transferring photons over 97 kilometers, using quantum teleportation.

2019: Carbon dioxide levels, in the earth's atmosphere, hit levels not seen for 3 million years, at 415 parts per million, according to the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.

[GordMay]

May 12

1215: English barons serve ultimatum on King John, which eventually leads to the creation and signing of the Magna Carta.

1551: San Marcos University, in Lima, Peru, opens (oldest continuously operating university in the Americas).

1784: Ratified copies of the ‘Treaty of Paris’, ending the Revolutionary War, exchanged between US and Great Britain, in Paris.

1789: William Wilberforce makes his first major speech on abolition, in the UK House of Commons, reasoning the slave trade morally reprehensible, and an issue of natural justice.

1797: ‘Nore Mutiny’: British Royal Navy sailors mutiny, on the Thames, England, and blockade London.

1820: English nurse Florence Nightingale, who founded trained nursing as a profession for women, was born in Florence, Italy.

1846: The ill-fated Donner party left Independence, Missouri, for California; months later the group became trapped in the Sierra Nevada, and some members reportedly resorted to cannibalism, when the food ran out.

1885: ‘Battle of Batoche’: Louis Riel and the Metis defeated by Frederick Middleton, leads to collapse of Provincial Government of Saskatchewan, and surrender of Riel

1926: Aboard the semirigid airship “Norge”, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, American scientist Lincoln Ellsworth, and Italian engineer Umberto Nobile made the first undisputed flight over the North Pole.

1937: Coronation of King George VI of Great Britain (and his other realms and territories beyond the sea), following the abdication of Edward VIII, at Westminster Abbey, London.

1938: Sandoz Labs begins manufacturing LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide).

1939: The first appropriation was made to the construction of the Harvard ‘Mark I’, eventually completed in 1944. The Mark I was the first successful fully automatic machine and computed three additions or subtractions a second; its memory stored 72 numbers of 23 digits (plus sign).

1940: French marines occupy St Maarten.

1941: Konrad Zuse presents the ‘Z3', the world's first working programmable, fully automatic electromechanical digital computer, in Berlin. It followed in the footsteps of the Z1 - the world’s first binary digital computer - which Zuse had developed in 1938. Much of Zuse’s work was destroyed in World War II, although the Z4, the most sophisticated of his creations, survives.

1949: The Soviet Union lifted its blockade of Berlin.

1951: 1st H-Bomb test, on Enewetak Atoll, in the north Pacific.

1958: US & Canada form North American Air Defense Command (NORAD).

1965: A tropical cyclone hit Bangladesh, killing 36,000 people.

1978: US Commerce Department says hurricane names will no longer be only female.

1984: South African prisoner Nelson Mandela sees his wife, Winnie Mandela, for the 1st time in 22 years.

1997: Australian Susie Maroney becomes first to swim from Cuba to Florida.

2008: Wenchuan earthquake, measuring 7.8 in magnitude, occurs in Sichuan, China, killing over 87,000, injuring 374,643, and leaving homeless between 4.8 million and 11 million people.

2020: Russia's confirmed cases of COVID-19 reach 232,000, 2nd highest in the world, a day after President Vladimir Putin eased the country's lockdown.

2021: Happy ‘International Nurses Day’!
The theme for the 2021 resource is Nurses: A Voice to Lead - A vision for future healthcare. In 2021, we seek to show how nursing will look into the future as well how the profession will transform the next stage of healthcare.
➥ https://www.icn.ch/what-we-do/campai...nal-nurses-day

[GordMay]

May 13

1637: According to tradition, France's Cardinal Richelieu invented the table knife; he reportedly had the tips rounded, to stop dinner companions from using knives to pick their teeth.

1648: Margaret Jones, of Plymouth, is found guilty of witchcraft, and is sentenced to be hanged.

1787: Arthur Phillip sets sails from Portsmouth, aboard HMS “Sirius”, with 10 other ships carrying 772 petty criminals [732 survived the voyage], a contingent of marines, and a handful of other officers, to Botany Bay, Australia.

1888: Slavery is abolished, in Brazil.

1912: Royal Flying Corps forms, in Great Britain.

1916: ‘Lafayette Escadrille’, an American air force unit under French command, comprised of volunteers to fight for France, sees first combat, at the Battle of Verdun.

1939: SS “St Louis” departs Hamburg, with 937 Jewish fugitives. Refused entry into North American ports, the ship was forced to return to Europe. 254 of its passengers later perished, in the Holocaust.
➥ http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.c...xoCdWgQAvD_BwE


1940: Winston Churchill says "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" in his first speech as Prime Minister, to British House of Commons.

1947: US Senate approved the ‘Taft-Hartley Act’, limiting the power of unions.

1958: The trade mark ‘Velcro’ is registered.

1979: Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and family, sentenced to death, in Tehran.

1981: Pope John Paul II is shot and critically wounded, by Turkish gunman Mehemet Ali Agca, in St Peter's Square, Vatican City.

1986: Len Shustek and Harry Saal found Network General Corp., which was a major provider of management solutions for computer networks, until its merger with McAfee Associates, in 1997, to form Network Associates. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the company's first product was "The Sniffer," a diagnostic tool for analyzing communications protocol problems in Local Area Networks.

1989: Approximately 2,000 students begin hunger strike, in Tiananmen Square, China. The non-violent occupation of the square was part of anti-corruption, and pro-democracy demonstrations. Some 3000 unarmed civilians were killed, when the army cracked down on the protesters, on June 3-4, 1989.

1991: Apple releases Macintosh System 7.0.

1995: Team New Zealand beats Team Dennis Conner 5-0, to win the America's Cup, for the first time.

2020: Every African country now has cases of COVID-19, as Lesotho becomes the last county, on the continent, to record a case.

[GordMay]

May 14

1607: English colonists establish the 1st permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown. Unknown to them, they have landed amidst the worst drought in 800 years.

1686: Gabriel Fahrenheit, inventor of the mercury thermometer, was born.

1787: Delegates gather, in Philadelphia, to draw up US constitution. Meetings had to be pushed back until May 25, when a sufficient quorum of the participating states; Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia had arrived. The delegates were determined to overhaul the new American government, as a whole, without a single ballot being cast, by the voting public.

1796: English country doctor Edward Jenner administers the first inoculation against smallpox, using cowpox pus, in Berkeley, Gloucestershire.

1804: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's expedition, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, sets out, from St Louis for Pacific Coast. Lewis and Clark commanded the ‘Corps of Discovery’ which consisted of 33 people, including one female Indian guide [Sacagawea] and one slave [York].

1853: Gail Borden applies for a patent, for condensed milk.

1861: The Canellas meteorite, an 859-gram chondrite-type meteorite, strikes the earth, near Barcelona, Spain.

1943: Sinking of the Australian Hospital Ship, “Centaur”, off the coast of Queensland, by a Japanese submarine.

1945: Physician Joseph G. Hamilton injects misdiagnosed cancer patient, Albert Stevens, (CAL-1) with 131 kBq (3.55 µCi) of plutonium, without his knowledge. Stevens lives another 20 years, surviving the highest known accumulated radiation dose, in any human.

1948: Israel declares independence, from British administration, precipitating the first Arab-Israeli war. It started the day after the proclamation, as troops of Egypt, Syria, TransJordan, and Iraq invaded the young nation.

1955: The ‘Warsaw Pact’, a mutual defense treaty, which played an important role during the Cold War as an antagonist of NATO, is signed by the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, & Romania.

1986: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation publishes Anne Frank's complete diary.

1992: Texas Instruments announced it would begin selling an advanced microprocessor, to compete with Intel's 486 chip. Also called the 486, the chip was designed by the Texas company Cyrix Corp. Texas Instruments' move was not successful in weakening Intel's dominance of the microprocessor industry.

[GordMay]

May 15

1252: Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull ‘ad exstirpanda’, which authorizes, but also limits, the torture of heretics, in the Medieval Inquisition.

1536: Anne Boleyn and her brother George, Lord Rochford, accused of adultery and incest, was beheaded, at the Tower of London, and Henry VIII was betrothed to Jayne Seymour, one day later.

1602: English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold discovers Cape Cod.

1618: German astronomer Johannes Kepler discovers the third, of his three planetary laws, his "harmonics law".

1862: Confederate ship “Alabama” launched. as the “Enrica”, at Birkenhead, England, where she had been built in secret.

1885: Louis Riel surrendered, after leading two rebellions, against the Canadian government.

1911: US Supreme Court dissolves Standard Oil (Sherman Antitrust Act).

1914: Mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, who, with Sir Edmund Hillary, was the first person to stand atop the summit of Mount Everest, was born in Tshechu, Tibet.

1918: The Finnish Civil War ends.

1940: Richard and Maurice McDonald open the 1st ‘McDonald's restaurant’, in San Bernardino, California.

1951: Hurricane ‘Able’ was a rare hurricane. that formed outside the typical North Atlantic hurricane season.
1951: AT&T becomes the 1st US corporation to have a million stockholders, after young car salesman Brady Denton purchases 7 shares, worth $1,078.

1957: ‘Operation Grapple’: Britain tests its first hydrogen bomb, near Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, and joined the thermonuclear club as the third member [behind USA & USSR].

1988: USSR begins withdrawing its 115,000 troops from Afghanistan.

2010: Jessica Watson, at age 16, becomes the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world [or Antarctica].

2011: Sony Begins Restoration of Its ‘PlayStation’ Network, after Cyber Attack compromises Sony Computer Entertainment's data center, in San Diego, California.

[GordMay]

May 16

1571: German astronomer Johannes Kepler, by his own calculations, is conceived at 4:37 AM. (isn't curiosity grand?)

1770: Marie Antoinette marries future King, Louis XVI, of France.

1792: Denmark abolishes slave trade.

1866: Pharmacist Charles E. Hires invents "Hires Root Beer".

1868: US Senate fails to impeach President Andrew Johnson, by one vote.

1881: World's 1st electric tram enters service in Lichterfelder (near Berlin).

1891: George A. Hormel establishes Geo. A.Hormel & Co. (Hormel Foods Corporation), in Austin, Minnesota.

1918: The Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government an imprisonable offense.

1938: Birthday of Ivan Sutherland, Inventor and Developer of Interactive Computer Graphics [MIT’s Sketchpad].

1943: ‘Operation Chastise’: No. 617 Squadron RAF begins the famous ‘Dambusters Raid’, bombing the Möhne and Eder dams, in the Ruhr valley, with bouncing bombs.
1943: SS General Jürgen Stroop orders the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto, ending a month of Jewish resistance. 13,000 Jews have died, about half burnt alive or suffocated, German casualties less than 300. Polish Jews, led by Mordecai Anielewicz and the Jewish Fighting Organization, resisted deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp.

1944: First of 180,000+ Hungarian Jews reach Auschwitz.

1951: The first regularly scheduled transatlantic flights begin, between Idlewild Airport (New York International Airport) and Heathrow Airport (London), operated by El Al Israel Airlines.

1960: Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories, in Malibu, California.

1966: "May 16 Notification" released, Mao's official justification for the Cultural Revolution.

1969: US nuclear sub “Guitarro” sinks, off San Francisco.

1975: Tabei Junko of Japan, accompanied by Ang Tsering of Nepal, became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1985: Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin announced their findings in the scientific journal Nature. They shared that the levels of ozone over the South Pole were abnormally low.
The three scientists, from the British Antarctic Survey, had no idea how their findings were going to mobilize a global movement, that former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date."
The scientific paper highlighted that there was a "hole" in the ozone layer. And that hole was created by mankind.
Within two years, 46 countries signed the Montreal Protocol [a treaty that pledged to phase out ozone depletion substances]. The Montreal Protocol has been a success. All 197 members of the United Nations have ratified the treaty. Because of the quick and effective action, current projections show that the ozone layer will return to pre-1980 levels, between 2050 and 2070.
“Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica reveal seasonal ClOx/NOx interaction” ~ by J. C. Farman, B. G. Gardiner & J. D. Shanklin
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/315207a0

1987: "Bobro 400", a barge carrying 3,200 tons of garbage, sets sail from NYC, beginning an unsuccessful 8 week search for a dumping site.

1988: US Surgeon General C Everett Koop reports nicotine as addictive as heroin.

1992: America's Cup: America Team USA defeats Il Moro di Venezia 4-1, to win in San Diego.

2013: Human stem cells are successfully cloned.

2019: British people get drunk more than any other nation, 51 times year, according to the Global Drug survey, with English-speaking countries drinking the most.

2019: New DNA research, showing bedbugs are older than humans - 115 million years old and outlived dinosaurs, published in "Current Biology".

[GordMay]

May 31

1279 BC: Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great, becomes Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt (19th Dynasty).

1578: Martin Frobisher sails from Harwich, England, to Frobisher Bay, Canada. Eventually mines fools gold, famously used to pave the streets of London.

1621: Sir Francis Bacon imprisoned in the Tower of London for 1 night.

1790: US copyright law enacted.
1790: Alferez Manuel Quimper explores the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

1853: Elisha Kane's Arctic expedition leaves NY aboard “Advance”.

1878: German battleship SMS “Grosser Kurfürst” sinks, 284 killed.

1884: Dr John Harvey Kellogg patents "flaked cereal" (aka: Corn Flakes).

1889: Johnstown Flood; 2,209 die in Pennsylvania.

1902: The Boer War ends, with the Treaty of Vereeniging.

1911: RMS “Titanic” launched in Belfast.

1916: Battle of Jutland: Largest naval battle of World War I, between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, which killed 8,645, in an inconclusive battle, but strategic British victory. German fleet never puts to sea again in WWI. HMS “Invincible” explodes, only 6 crew members survive.

1921: Tulsa Race Riot
One hundred years ago on May 31, 1921, and into the next day, a white mob destroyed Tulsa’s burgeoning Greenwood District, known as the “Black Wall Street,” in what experts call the single-most horrific incident of racial terrorism since slavery. And despite this devastation and loss, the story of Greenwood and the massacre is largely unknown among most Americans.
In 2001, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 released a comprehensive report [1] and in 2015 the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission was created [2] in order to appropriately memorialize the 100th anniversary of the event, which is ongoing this year.
An estimated 300 people were killed within the district’s 35 square blocks, burning to the ground more than 1,200 homes, at least 60 businesses, dozens of churches, a school, a hospital and a public library, according to a report issued by Human Rights Watch [3].

[1] Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 [2001]
➥ https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf

[2] 1921 TULSA RACE MASSACRE CENTENNIAL COMMISSION
➥ https://www.tulsa2021.org/

[3] The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma
➥ https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/29/...a#_Toc41573961

Tulsa Race Massacre, 100 years later: Why it happened and why it's still relevant today
➥ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/...d-why-n1268877

1931: Magnitude 7.1 earthquake destroys Quetta, in modern-day Pakistan: 40,000 dead.

1935: Magnitude 7.7 earthquake hits Quetta, in Balochistan, British Raj (Pakistan), killing an estimated 50,000 people.

1962: The State of Israel hanged German official Adolf Eichmann, who had escaped from a prison camp in 1946, and spent some 14 years in hiding, for his part in the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II.

1969: John Lennon and Yoko Ono record "Give Peace a Chance", in a Montreal hotel, during their second 'bed-in' for peace.

1970: Magnitude 7.75 Ancash earthquake, off coast of Peru, kills 66-70,000, and sets off world's deadliest avalanche.

[GordMay]

June 1

1495: First written record of Scotch Whisky appears in Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, Friar John Cor is the distiller.

1543: Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius publishes "De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body in seven books)" a major step forward in understanding human anatomy [date is representative as exact date of publication unknown].

1676: Battle of Öland: allied Danish-Dutch forces defeat the Swedish navy in the Baltic Sea, during the Scanian War (1675–79).

1813: American navy captain James [John] Lawrence, mortally wounded in a naval engagement with the British, exhorts to the crew of his vessel, the “Chesapeake”: "Don't give up the ship!" (U.S. Navy slogan)

1869: Thomas Edison granted his first patent, for the Electric Vote Recorder (U.S. Patent 90,646).

1918: Canadian ace Billy Bishop downs 6 aircraft, over a three-day span, including German ace Paul Bilik, reclaiming his top scoring title from James McCudden.

1936": “Queen Mary” completes its maiden voyage, arriving in NYC.

1939: British submarine "Thetis" sinks in Liverpool Bay, with all 99 aboard.

1965: Robert Manry begins his 78 day voyage, to sail a 13.5-foot yacht "Tinkerbelle", across the Atlantic Ocean.

1973: Eight OPEC countries raise price of petroleum by 11.9 percent.

1974: The Heimlich maneuver, for rescuing choking victims, is published in the journal ‘Emergency Medicine’.

2002: The Czech Republic became the first country to enact a law to address light pollution; all outdoor fixtures were required to have a shield that prevented light from extending above the horizontal.

2009: General Motors files for chapter 11 bankruptcy. It is the fourth largest United States bankruptcy in history. It soon emerged from the reorganization, and in 2010 returned to the stock market, with one of the largest IPOs in U.S. history.

2017: US President Donald Trump announces the US is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

[GordMay]

June 2

1676: Battle at Palermo: French beats Dutch and Spanish fleet.

1875: Alexander Graham Bell makes first sound transmission.

1896: Italian engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi applies for the first ever patent for a system of wireless telegraphy, in the United Kingdom.

1953: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

1969: Australian aircraft carrier HMAS “Melbourne” slices US destroyer USS “Frank E Evans” in half, killing 74 (South Vietnam).

[GordMay]

June 3

1098: Christian Crusaders of the First Crusade seize Antioch, Turkey.

1539: Hernando de Soto claims Florida for Spain. Commissioned by the Spanish crown, to conquer Florida, Hernando de Soto. and his expedition of 10 ships, and 700 men landed on the coast of Florida in 1539. He was then one of the wealthiest, and most successful of the Spanish conquistadors, having worked as a slave trader in Panama and the West Indies, and as Francisco Pizarro's second-in-command, during the conquest of Peru. In 1841, his expedition made the first European sighting of the Mississippi River. De Soto died of a fever ,in 1542, and his body was interred in the Mississippi River.

1540: Hernando de Soto crosses the Appalachian Mountains, 1st European to do so.

1789: Explorer Alexander Mackenzie sets out on his first expedition to the Pacific, from Fort Chipewyan (finds the Arctic Ocean instead).

1918: US Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart rules child labor laws unconstitutional.

1935: French liner SS “Normandie” sets Atlantic crossing record of four days, three hours, and 14 minutes, on her maiden voyage.

1948: 200" (5.08 m) Hale telescope dedicated at Palomar Observatory.

1959: US President Eisenhower routes Canadian premier Diefenbaker a message, off the Moon.

1965: “Gemini 4" launched; 2nd US 2-man flight (McDivitt & White); mission included 1st US spacewalk 23 min, by Ed White.

1966: “Gemini 9" launched; 7th US 2-man flight (Stafford & Cernan).

1989: Beginning of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, as Chinese troops open fire on pro-democracy supporters in Beijing. Nobody knows how many people died in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The official Chinese Government figure is 241, but other estimates range from 800 to 4,000
deaths.

1991: Mount Unzen erupts in Japan, worst eruption in Japanese history.

2007: USS “Carter Hall”(LSD-50) engages with pirates, after they board Danish ship “Danica White”, off the coast of Somalia.

2015: Dr. Jesse Selber performs the world's first partial-skull and scalp transplant, at Houston Methodist Hospital.

2016: American boxer and social activist Muhammad Ali died, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

2018: Guatemala's ‘Fuego volcano’ erupts, killing at least 110, with 332 missing, and forcing the evacuation of over 3,100.
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.

2020: Three former police officers charged, in connection with death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin's charge upgraded to second degree murder.

[GordMay]

June 4

781 BC: Oldest Chinese recording of a solar eclipse.

1629: Dutch East India ship “Batavia” wrecks on Morning Reef, off the Houtman Abrolhos, Western Australia, with 200 survivors (only 70 survive after three months, due to mutiny and murders).

1769: A transit of Venus is followed, five hours later, by a total solar eclipse, the shortest such interval in history.

1792: Captain George Vancouver claims Puget Sound for Britain.

1887: Pasteur Institute founded, by French biologist Louis Pasteur, in Paris.

1919: The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, was passed by the Senate, two weeks after being approved by the House of Representatives; the amendment was ratified the following year.

1992: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is signed in New York.

[GordMay]

June 5

1099: Members of the First Crusade witness an eclipse of the moon, and interpret it as a sign they will recapture Jerusalem.

1661: Isaac Newton admitted as a student, to Trinity College, Cambridge.

1799: Naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland set sail, in the “Pizarro”, from A Coruña, and begin their 5 year Latin American expedition.

1829: HMS “Pickle” captures the armed slave ship “Voladora”, off the coast of Cuba.

1863: The Confederate raider CSS “Alabama” captures the “Talisman”, in the Mid-Atlantic.

1933: US drops the Gold Standard, when Congress enacts a joint resolution, nullifying creditors right to demand payment in gold.

1947: Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlines "The Marshall Plan", a program intended to assist European nations, including former enemies, to rebuild their economies.

1963: British Minister of War John Profumo resigns, due to Christine Keeler scandal.

1967: The Six-Day War, between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan begins.

1968: Sirhan Sirhan shoots, and kills, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, after Kennedy's victory, in the pivotal California primary election.

1975: United Kingdom electorate votes 67% to 33%, in a referendum to remain part of the European Common Market.

1976: Teton Dam, in Idaho, bursts, causing $1 billion damage (14 die).

1981: AIDS Epidemic officially begins, when US Centers for Disease Control reports on pneumonia, affecting five homosexual men, in Los Angeles.

1988: Kay Cottee sails into Sydney, as 1st woman to circle globe alone.

1995: The Bose-Einstein condensate is first created.

2001: Tropical Storm Allison came ashore on the Texas Gulf coast. Parts of Texas and Louisiana received over 30 inches of rain in less than a week. At least 17 people lost their lives in the flooding. Damages reached $6 billion, making it the most costly tropical storm [non-hurricane] in history.
For all United States hurricanes, Hurricane Katrina (2005, $172.5B*) is the costliest storm on record. Hurricane Harvey (2017, $133.8B*) ranks second, Hurricane Maria (2017, $96.3B*) ranks third, Hurricane Sandy (2012, $75.4B*) ranks fourth, and Hurricane Irma (2017, $53.5B*) ranks fifth.

2004: Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan dies, at age 93. Reagan was the 40th president of the United States.

2013: The first article based on NSA leaked documents, by Edward Snowden, are published by the Guardian Newspaper, in the UK.

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".
“Human Consumption of Microplastics” ~ Kieran D. Cox et al
➥ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01517

[GordMay]

June 6

1813: The United States invasion of Canada is halted at Stony Creek, Ontario.

1816: Eruption of Mount Tambora.
The eruption of Mount Tambora was the largest eruption ever witnessed. Its Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) was 7, the only known eruption on that scale since the eruption of Lake Taupo in about 180 AD. The eruption blew 150 cubic km into the atmosphere, killing 10,000 people initially. The eruptions' column was so high it reached the stratosphere at an altitude of more than 43 kilometres.
The effects were felt worldwide, 1816 was "the year without a summer". Crops failed across Asia and up to 90,000 people probably died of famine. It was the second-coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere since 1400 and parts of North America experienced frost and snow in June and July.

1832: English jurist, philosopher, Jeremy Bentham died.

1848: New York Yacht Club holds its first annual regatta; won by the schooner “Carnelia”.

1868: English navy officer, explorer, Robert Falcon Scott born.

1891: Canadian politician, 1st Prime Minister of Canada, John A. Macdonald died.

1896: Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo leave NY harbour, to row across Atlantic; their 55 day record for rowing was not broken for 114 years.

1912: The eruption of Novarupta in Alaska begins, the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century.

1939: The ship MS “St. Louis”, carrying 907 Jewish refugees from Europe, begins sailing back to the continent, after it was refused entry into gthe Americas. Approximately a quarter of those on board would perish in the Holocaust.

1944: ‘D-Day’ [‘Operation Overlord’] lands 400,000 Allied American, British, and Canadian troops, on the beaches of Normandy ,in German-occupied France.
But by day’s end, 155,000 Allied troops [Americans, British and Canadians] had successfully stormed Normandy’s beaches, and were then able to push inland. Within three months, the northern part of France would be freed, and the invasion force would be preparing to enter Germany, where they would meet up with Soviet forces, moving in from the east.

1979: Eight hundred people were killed in Bihar, India, in the world's worst train disaster, when a cyclone blew a train from a railroad track, and into a river.

1984: The video game Tetris is published. Russian computer engineer, Alexey Pajitnov, created the puzzle game. With over 100 million copies sold, it is one of the most successful video games in history.

2012: The ‘Solar Impulse’ completes the world's first solar powered intercontinental flight.

[GordMay]

June 7

632: Muhammad, the founder of the religion of Islam, and of the Muslim community, died in Medina.

1494: Treaty of Tordesillas: Spain and Portugal divide the new world along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. This line stretched pole to pole, west of the Verde Islands. Spain was to take all lands to the west, including Christopher Columbus' new discoveries, and Portugal to the east, including the coast of Africa. It later enabled Portugal to claim the coast of Brazil. Other European nations never accepted the treaty, or its terms.

1576: English navigator Martin Frobisher, seeking a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean, departed England, and weeks later he reached Labrador and Baffin Island, and discovered the bay that now bears his name.

1665: Great Plague of London: Samuel Pepys writes in his diary of houses marked with a red cross in London's Drury Lane, meaning somebody inside is infected with the plague and must be locked in for 40 days or until death

1692: A massive earthquake devastates the town of Port Royal, in Jamaica, killing thousands. The strong tremors, soil liquefaction and a tsunami, brought on by the earthquake, combined to destroy the entire town. In all, about 3,000 people lost their lives. In the aftermath, widespread looting began that evening, and thousands more died in the following weeks, due to sickness and injury. Aftershocks discouraged the survivors from rebuilding Port Royal. Instead, the city of Kingston was built.

1776: Richard Lee (Virginia) moves Declaration of Independence in Continental Congress.
1776-06-11 Continental Congress creates committee to draft a Declaration of Independence with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston as members
1776-06-28 Final draft of Declaration of Independence submitted to Continental Congress
1776-07-01 1st vote on Declaration of Independence for Britain's North American colonies
1776-07-04 US Congress proclaims the Declaration of Independence and independence from Great Britain
1776-08-02 Formal signing of the US Declaration of Independence by 56 people (date most accepted by modern historians)

1798: Thomas Malthus publishes the first edition of his influential 'Essay on the Principle of Population' (date of the unsigned preface).

1893: Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience. In an event that would have dramatic repercussions for the people of India, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer working in South Africa, refuses to comply with racial segregation rules, on a South African train, and is forcibly ejected at Pietermaritzburg.


1906: Cunard passenger liner “Lusitania” launches.

1954: English mathematician Alan Turing dies.

1955: British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who was generally credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web, was born.

1965: Sony Corp introduced its home video tape recorder, priced at $995.

1975: Sony introduces the Betamax videocassette recorder, for sale to the public.

1989: For one second this morning, the time is 01:23:45, 6-7-89.

1991: Mount Pinatubo (Philippines) erupts for 1st time.

2009: The United Nations hosted its first World Oceans Day, which sought to celebrate oceans while also raising awareness of the threats that they and their marine ecosystems faced.

2017: Earliest-ever evidence of Homo Sapiens, from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, unearthed by archaeologists, published in "Nature", at 300,000+ years old.
“Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species' history”
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22114
“New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens” ~ by Jean-Jacques Hublin et al
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22336

[GordMay]

June 8

0452: Attila the Hun invades Italy.

1504: Michelangelo's statue of David is believed to have been installed, in the cathedral of Florence, this day in 1504. ‘David’ was, commissioned in 1501, and considered the prime statement of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity.

1874: Chief Cochise, one of the great leaders of the Apache Indians in their battles with the Anglo-Americans, dies, on the Chiricahua reservation, in southeastern Arizona.

1887: Herman Hollerith patents his punch card calculator. The U.S. data processing pioneer, one of the grandfathers of the technology company IBM, used his revolutionary machine to process the large amount of data collected during the U.S. census of 1890/1891.

1949: George Orwell's novel of a dystopian future, “Nineteen Eighty-Four", is published. The novel, “1984", was a warning against totalitarianism, that introduced such concepts as ‘Big Brother’ and the ‘Thought Police’.

1972: Nick Út takes his famous “napalm girl” photo. The Pulitzer Prize-winning image officially entitled “The Terror of War” depicts nine-year-old Phan Th Kim Phúc, and other Vietnamese children, fleeing a napalm attack.

1987: The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987 barred any nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships from entering the country. New Zealand was the first country to legislate towards a nuclear-free zone, in the 1950s.