Category: Today

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.

• The Roundheads defeated the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War on June 1, 1648.
• The court-martial for malfeasance of Benedict Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, began on this date in 1779.
• Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the United States in 1792 on the same day of the month.
• Tennessee was admitted as the 16th state of the United States exactly four years later.
• Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey declared the Territory of Minnesota officially established — 1849.
• The Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed, allowing the Navajo to return to their lands in Arizona and New Mexico, in 1868.
• The United States Census Bureau began using, on June 1, 1890, Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine to count census returns.
• Adolf Eichmann, a former SS officer in Nazi Germany, was hanged on June 1, 1962, in Israel . . . for having committed crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other offenses.
• The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims was first published in the June 1, 1974, issue of Emergency Medicine.
• George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty to end chemical weapon production in 1990, on the first day of June.

On May 31, A.D. 455, Emperor Petronius Maximus was stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome from a Vandal invasion that was, in fact, blowback from his own power politics. Thus ended his two-and-a-half month reign, which he had obtained by murder and bribery.

Petronius Maximus made at least one strategic mistake, attempting to strengthen his position by forcing Licinia Eudoxia, the previous emperor’s widow, to marry him — and forcing her daughter Eudocia to marry his son. This latter arrangement canceled Eudocia’s betrothal to the son of the Vandal king Genseric, infuriating both Eudocia and Genseric, who sent a fleet to Rome. Maximus failed to obtain troops from the Visigoths and he fled as the Vandals arrived. In the hubbub, he became detached from his retinue and bodyguard and was killed by fellow Romans.

In one of the most consequential sieges in western history, Titus Caesar Vespasianus and his Roman legions breached the Second Wall of Jerusalem on May 30 of A.D. 70. Jewish defenders retreated to the First Wall, but were overcome before summer’s end. Titus’s armies crucified thousands and destroyed the historic Second Temple.

Rhode Island became the last of North America’s revolutionary thirteen colonies to ratify the United States Constitution, on May 29, 1790.

After two months of vigorous revolutionary acts — from “social democratic” reforms to public executions — the Paris Commune fell on May 28, 1871.

The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously declared key portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional, in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495), on May 27, 1935.