THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
Sunday, June 9
1534: French explorer Jacques Cartier became the first European to sail into the St. Lawrence River.
1972: Bruce Springsteen signed a contract with Columbia Records. His debut album, “Greetings from Asbury Park,” was released about seven months later.
Monday, June 10
1898: U.S. Marines landed at Guantanamo Bay, part of a war in Cuba that led to the end of Spanish colonization in the Americas that had begun the year after the voyage of Christopher Columbus.
1967: Israel signed a cease-fire agreement to end the Six-Day War as the victor. The agreement had been signed by neighboring foes Jordan and Egypt two days prior, as well as Syria the day before. During the war, Israel had taken the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula, which led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians who had lived in those areas.
2007: HBO aired the final episode of “The Sopranos” series to cap its sixth season.
2020: The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. surpassed 2 million.
Tuesday, June 11
1776: Congress appointed a committee to draft what became the Declaration of Independence, including Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert Livingston of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.
1949: Country singer Hank Williams Sr. made his “Grand Ole Opry” debut at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee.
1963: During a live address on TV and radio in response to instability at the University of Alabama after desegregation attempts there and racially charged confrontations at protests around the country, President John Kennedy called on Congress to pass what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
1963: Alabama Gov. George Wallace decried federal government overreach in forcing desegregation at the University of Alabama in his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” speech.
Wednesday, June 12
1939: The Baseball Hall of Fame opened with its first induction ceremony in Cooperstown, New York.
1942: Anne Frank received a diary as a present for her 13th birthday. The Jewish German girl used it later that year to record her Holocaust experiences hiding in a secret Amsterdam apartment from Nazis.
1963: Civil rights activist Medgar Evers, 37, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, was assassinated by segregationist and white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
1987: President Ronald Reagan spoke to a crowd in West Berlin, aiming to ease Cold War nuclear tensions between the U.S. and the USSR. With the Berlin Wall behind him, Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
1991: After the collapse of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of Russia in the country’s first democratic election.
2014: Islamic State forces killed up to an estimated 1,700 Shiite Muslim Iraqi cadets in Tikrit, Iraq, a massacre that was at the time the world’s second deadliest terrorist act with only 9/11 having a higher death toll.
2016: Pulse nightclub in Orlando became the site of the nation’s thendeadliest mass shooting when 29-yearold gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others before being killed by police in a shootout.
2018: At the Singapore Summit, President Donald Trump became the first U.S. leader to meet with a North Korean leader when he and Kim Jong-un had peace talks.
Thursday, June 13
1774: Rhode Island prohibited importing slaves, making it the first British colony in North America to do so.
1966: In Miranda v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court decided any person whom officers suspect committed a crime and take into custody must be advised they have rights before police interrogation. These include the right to hire an attorney or have a court appoint one, as well as “the right to remain silent.”
1967: President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall, who was confirmed by the Senate a couple months later and became the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
1971: The New York Times published the first leaked excerpts in a series of investigative stories with the headline that read “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement.” Portions of the classified Defense Department report – later called the Pentagon Papers – had been leaked to the Times and Washington Post. On the 40th anniversary of the leak, the National Archives posted the fully declassified report with no redactions and separate PDFs for each volume on its website.
2002: As President George W. Bush previously announced, the U.S. pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that it and the USSR had signed in 1972.
2005: A California jury found pop musician Michael Jackson not guilty of all child molestation charges.
Friday, June 14
1775: Two months after the Revolutionary War began with shots fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, the Continental Congress approved creation of the Continental Army, marking the birth of the U.S. Armed Forces.
1939: NBC aired “The Ethel Waters Show,” a variety special featuring Waters, the first Black American television star.
1940: Nazi Germans began occupying Paris after they defeated French forces early in World War II.
1949: A rhesus macaque monkey named Albert II became the first mammal in space after he launched 83 miles from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in a capsule with a V-2 rocket. Albert II suffocated to death after a parachute failure caused a crash-landing.
1954: President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill that added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
2017: While practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game near the nation’s capital, U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., Capitol Police Special Agent Crystal Griner, lobbyist Matt Mika and congressional aide Zack Barth were shot before officers fatally shot the gunman.
Saturday, June 15
1212: Tyrannical King John of England signed the Magna Carta, Latin for the
“Great Charter,” a peace agreement between him and rebellious, libertyseeking barons that didn’t last. Pope Innocent III annulled the treaty before the First Barons’ War. The treaty was revived multiple times and served as a model for colonists who drafted the
U.S. Constitution.
1667: French Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys performed the first-known blood transfusion.
1775: The Continental Congress appointed Gen. George Washington as the commander in chief of the Continental Army.
1776: Nearly three weeks before the Fourth of July, Delaware leaders voted at the Old State House to declare the state’s independence from Britain. The date became known as Delaware Separation Day.
1844: The U.S. Patent Office approved a patent for Charles Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber, a combination of India rubber, sulfur and white lead that was heat resistant.
1864: Congress approved a bill equalizing pay, arms, equipment and medical services for Black American troops. Congress also made the measure retroactive.
1904: Fire killed over 1,000 of about 1,350 people aboard the steamboat PS General Slocum, a sidewheel passenger ship. Most of the passengers were women and children from the German American community of New York’s Lower East Side. The ship caught fire in the East River on its way to Long Island’s North Shore.
1944: After heavy naval gunfire and aircraft bombing, U.S. Marines stormed the beaches of the Japanese-held island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. It was the first heavily defended land mass in the Central Pacific to be assaulted by U.S. amphibious forces. America’s victory in Saipan was key to its strategy for striking Japan with B-29 bombers.
1973: Motown Records released Marvin Gaye’s 13th studio album, “Let’s Get It On,” which went on to top Billboard’s rhythm and blues, as well as pop charts.
1989: Sub Pop Records released Nirvana’s debut album, “Bleach,” which the band had recorded at Reciprocal Recording in Seattle for about $600.
1996: Iconic American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald died at 79.
– Charlie White, USA TODAY Network