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From: "Dianna M. Fisher" <>
Subject: [BS-L] Today in History June 20
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 23:08:22 -0700


Today in History

June 20

451 Roman and Barbarian warriors halt Attila's army at the Catalaunian
Plains in eastern France.

1397 The Union of Kalmar unites Denmark, Sweden, and Norway under one monarch.

1756 Nearly 150 captured British soldiers in India are imprisoned in the
'Black Hole' cell of Calcutta. Most die.

1782 Congress approved the Great Seal of the United States.

1793 Eli Whitney applies for a cotton gin patent.

1837 Queen Victoria ascended the British throne following the death of her
uncle, King William the Fourth.

1863 President Abraham Lincoln admits West Virginia into the Union as the
35th state.

1893 A jury in New Bedford, Massachusetts, found Lizzie Borden innocent of
the ax murders of her father and stepmother.

1898 On the way to the Philippines to fight the Spanish, the U.S. Navy
seizes the island of Guam.

1901 Charlotte M. Manye of South Africa becomes the first native African to
graduate from an American University.

1910 Mexican President Porfirio Diaz proclaims martial law and arrests
hundreds.

1920 Race riots in Chicago, Illinois leave two dead and many wounded.

1923 France announces it will seize the Rhineland to assist Germany in
paying her war debts.

1941 The U.S. Army Air Forces is established, replacing the Army Air Corps.

1943 Race-related rioting erupted in Detroit; federal troops were sent in
two days later to quell the violence that resulted in more than 30 deaths.

1944 Vice Admiral Marc Mitchner, commander of the U.S. Task Force 58,orders
all lights on his ships turned on to help guide his carrier-based pilots
back from the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

1947 Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was shot dead at the Beverly Hills,
California, mansion of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, apparently at the
order of mob associates.

1955 The AFL and CIO agree to combine names for a merged group.

1963 The United States and the Soviet Union agree to establish a hot line
between Washington and Moscow.

1964 General William Westmoreland succeeds General Paul Harkins as head of
the U.S. forces in Vietnam.

1967 Boxing champion Muhammad Ali is convicted of refusing induction into
the American armed services.

1972 President Richard Nixon names General Creigton Abrams as
Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces.

1979 ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart was shot to death in Managua,
Nicaragua, by a member of President Anastasio Somoza's national guard.

1995 US Air Force Captain Jim Wang, a radar officer, was cleared of
wrongdoing in a friendly fire attack on two US helicopters over northern
Iraq in 1994 that resulted in 26 deaths.

1999 NATO declares an official end to its bombing campaign of Yugoslavia.

Born on June 20

1723 Adam Ferguson, Scottish man of letters, philosopher, historian, and
patriot who wrote Principals of Moral and Political Science.

1899 Jean Moulin, French Resistance fighter against Nazi Germany.

1909 Errol Flynn, actor who starred in The Adventures of Robin Hood and
Captain Blood among many other movies.

1924 Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II who
went on to make movies and write a book about his war experiences called To
Hell and Back.

1928 Jean-Marie Le-Pen, leader of the National Front party in France.

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