1462 – Vlad III the Impaler attempts to assassinate Mehmed II (The Night Attack) forcing him to retreat from Wallachia. You might know him by his family name: Dracula.
1579 – Sir Francis Drake claims a land he calls Nova Albion (modern California) for England.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Bunker Hill, actually was fought on nearby Breed’s Hill. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” was attributed to one of several American officers, and meant that the Americans were to wait until the Brits were with twenty-five yard before opening fire. (Try it for yourself. Have a friend start walking toward you and see how close he gets before you can see the whites of his eyes.) While the Brits ended up with the hill, they suffered the greater number of casualties, their greatest single loss of the war.
1917 – British King George V takes the name Windsor, because the old family name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha sounds just a little bit too German at the time.
1901 – The College Board introduces its first standardized test, the forerunner to the SAT.
1940 – World War II: Operation Ariel begins – Allied troops start to evacuate France, following Germany’s takeover of Paris and most of the nation. 215,000 Allied soldiers escape. 5800 are lost in one incident when German bombers sink the RMS Lancastria.
1940 – French General Charles De Gaulle departs Bordeaux for London where he will single-handedly defeat Germany and drive them from France.
1940 – The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union. They remain enslaved for fifty years.
1953 – East Germany Workers Uprising: in East Germany, the Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion by people who didn’t like the central government running every aspect of their lives. Wait for it…
1963 – The United States Supreme Court rules 8 to 1 in Abington School District v. Schempp against allowing the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer in public schools because kids should get every opportunity in the world to grow up into amoral heathens who live according to the tenets of ‘if I think it’s right, it’s right.’
1971 – President Richard Nixon declares the U.S. War on Drugs. It’s every bit as successful as Lyin’ Ba*tard Johnson’s War on Poverty.
1994 – Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O.J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. He’d’ve found the real killer by now if he wasn’t in prison for something else.
