THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
Sunday, June 23
1926: The College Entrance Examination Board first administered the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, for prospective college students.
1972: President Richard Nixon signed into law Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination based on sex in education programs and activities that get federal financial funding. It includes pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity.
1972: President Richard Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, were recorded in the Oval Office on what became known as the “Smoking Gun” tape.
1991: Sega released the first “Sonic the Hedgehog” video game in North America. Bundled with its 16-bit
Genesis gaming system, the fast-paced game sold about 15 million copies worldwide.
Monday, June 24
1833: Destined for an overhaul spurred by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1830 poem, “Old Ironsides,” the wooden-hulled heavy frigate USS Constitution became the first ship to enter the new dry dock at Charlestown Navy Yard near Boston.
1989: Garth Brooks made his Grand Ole Opry debut about two months after the release of his self-titled first album.
2004: The New York Court of Appeals ruled the death penalty to be unconstitutional within the state.
2022: The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey with its ruling in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which gave states the authority to regulate abortions instead of the federal government.
Tuesday, June 25
1876: In protest of a U.S. War Department order to return to their reservations, about 2,000 Native Americans led by Sitting Bull defended land rights at the Battle of Little Big Horn, killing Army Lt. Col. George Custer and over 250 7th Cavalry Regiment soldiers under his command over two days in what is now Montana. About 8,000 Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people had come to camp along the Little Big Horn River that year after the Army ignored a treaty and seized the Lakota reservation in the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota.
1947: Contact first published “The Diary of a Young Girl,” the journal of Anne Frank’s experience that began when she was 13, about three weeks before she and family members went into hiding for two years from the Nazis who occupied the Netherlands during World War II.
1950: North Korea started the Korean War by crossing the 38th parallel and invading South Korea with support from the USSR.
Wednesday, June 26
1870: Along the New Jersey shore, Atlantic City’s Boardwalk opened. It was the idea of railroad conductor Alexander Boardman and hotelier Jacob Keim, who aimed to keep beach sand out of trains and hotels.
1945: At the end of the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, 50 allied countries ratified the U.N. charter, which took effect four months later to replace the League of Nations.
1997: Bloomsbury published author J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” in the U.K. Scholastic published it the next year in the U.S.
2015: In Obergfell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages throughout the nation and its territories, a ruling that required states to license LGBTQ+ unions within their jurisdictions and recognize others as valid from other states.
Thursday, June 27
1895: The first U.S. passenger train with an electric locomotive was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s Royal Blue Line, which made its initial trip to New York City from Washington, D.C.
2007: Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie set a world record for a one-hour run, covering 21,285 meters, or 13.2 miles, in 60 minutes
Friday, June 28
1839: Joseph Cinqué, believed to be born Sengbe Pieh, the son of a village leader in the Mende region of what’s now Sierra Leone, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Cuba along with several other Africans. Cinque and his companions later carried out the famous successful revolt upon the slave ship Amistad.
1894: President Grover Cleveland signed legislation that made Labor Day a national holiday to be celebrated on the first Monday in September.
1914: Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, a double fatal shooting by a Serbian nationalist that helped fuel the start of World War I.
1919: World War I ended after Germany and the Allied powers ratified the Treaty of Versailles in Paris.
1969: New York police executing a search warrant raided an LGBTQ+ bar called the Stonewall Inn, and some of the patrons resisted as officers continued interrogating them and bar employees. The initial resistance the first night continued into early the next morning, then more protesters converged on the area the next night with fighting that lasted into the next week.
1970: The first Gay Pride marches in the U.S. were organized one year after the Stonewall Uprising. Thousands of LGBTQ+ people demonstrated for equal rights in in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Saturday, June 29
1956: The U.S. interstate system was created when President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The automobile-centric project cut through American communities, spurring the demolition of many urban structures and displacement of over a million people, many of whom were Black and poor. Many smaller towns were bypassed.
2007: Apple Inc. began selling its first-generation iPhone.
2020: Gilead Sciences Inc. priced Remdesivir, a COVID-19 antiviral treatment that can reduce the need for ventilators, at $3,120 per typical treatment course for insured patients in the U.S., even though the drug’s development and clinical trials received up to $6.5 billion in public funds.
– Charlie White, USA TODAY Network