Category: Today

On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.

On the same date in 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame in a busy Saigon intersection as a protest against South Vietnam’s lack of religious freedom.

This year marks the semisequicentennial year of the United States, and 63 years since 1963’s sad Thich Quang Duc self-immolation.

Apple shipped the first Apple II computer on June 10, 1977. It was typographically styled as the “Apple ][” and the series continued long after the specific II model was superseded by the Apple II Plus and was discontinued in 1981. The last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes, was discontinued on October 15, 1993.

Born on this day (June 10th): historian, jazz critic and civil libertarian Nathan Irving Hentoff (1925); children’s writer Maurice Sendak (1929); scientist and pioneer of “sociobiology,” E. O. Wilson (1929).

Hentoff wrote several works on the history and nature of free speech in America, including The First Freedom (1980). Sendak is most famous for Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Wilson’s many books include Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).

---

---

Sendak died in 2012, Hentoff in 2017, while Wilson died on December 26, 2021.

In A.D. 68, on the Ninth of June, Roman emperor Nero committed suicide with the help of his secretary, Epaphroditus. With this act, Nero ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty and started the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors, which concluded under the rule of Vespasian. His famous last words?

Qualis artifex pereo

Which translates to “What a great artist dies in me.”

On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.

During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address . . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on as a eulogistic way to refer to figures such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England’s imperial monarchy.

On June 6, 2002, a high-energy upper atmosphere explosion over the Mediterranean Sea (c. 34°N 21°E) occurred. Similar in power to a small atomic bomb, the cause of the fireball has been determined to be a small, undetected asteroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning out without hitting the surface, though no meteorite fragments were recovered. One of the several meanings of the word “bolide” is this, an atmospheric explosion of a meteor.

General Simon Worden of the U.S. Air Force opined that, had the explosion occurred closer to Pakistan or India — which were at war at the time — it could have sparked a nuclear exchange.*

---

* “Near-Earth Objects Pose Threat, General Says,” Space Daily (2002-09-17).

On June 5, 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, started its ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper. It had been announced earlier, in the May 8th issue of the paper.

On June 3, 1959, Singapore adopted a constitution.

On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.