June 4
1760 –
Great Upheaval: New England planters arrive to claim land in Nova Scotia, Canada, taken from the
Acadians.
1792 – Captain
George Vancouver claims
Puget Sound for the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1825 –
General Lafayette, a French officer in the American Revolutionary War, speaks at what would become
Lafayette Square, Buffalo, NY during
his visit to the United States.
1876 – An express train called the
Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, via the
First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.
1896 – Henry Ford completes the
Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gives it a successful test run.
1912 – Massachusetts becomes the first state of the United States to set a
minimum wage.
1919 – Women's rights: The U.S. Congress approves the 1
9th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification.
1939 – The Holocaust: The
MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in
Nazi concentration camps.
1940 – World War II: The
Dunkirk evacuation ends: British forces complete evacuation of 338,000 troops from Dunkirk in France. To rally the morale of the country, Winston Churchill delivers, only to the House of Commons, his famous
"We shall fight on the beaches" speech.
1942 - Glenn Wallichs launched
Capitol Records in the US. Wallichs was the man who invented the art of record promotion by sending copies of new releases to disc jockeys.
1944 – World War II: A hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captures the
German submarine U-505: The first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century.
1974 – During
Ten Cent Beer Night(<---read), inebriated
Cleveland Indians fans start a riot, causing the game to be forfeited to the
Texas Rangers.
1984 - Bruce Springsteen released the album,
'Born In The USA', which became the best-selling album of 1985 in the United States (and also Springsteen's most successful album ever). The album produced a record-tying string of seven Top 10 singles.
1986 –
Jonathan Pollard pleads guilty to espionage for selling top secret United States military intelligence to Israel.
1989 – The
Tiananmen Square protests are violently ended in Beijing by the People's Liberation Army, with at least 241 dead.
1997 -
Jeff Buckley's body was discovered floating in the Mississippi River. Buckley had disappeared when swimming on May 29th in Wolf River Harbor, while wearing boots, all of his clothing, and singing the chorus of 'Whole Lotta Love' by Led Zeppelin. A roadie in Buckley's band, had remained on shore. After moving a radio and guitar out of reach of the wake from a passing tugboat, he looked up to see that Buckley had vanished.
1998 – Terry Nichols is sentenced to life in prison for his role in the
Oklahoma City bombing.
2012 – The
concert for Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee takes place outside Buckingham Palace in London.
2015 – An
explosion at a gasoline station in Accra, Ghana, killing over 200 people.
Births
1907 – Rosalind Russell; 1910 – Christopher Cockerell; 1924 – Dennis Weaver; 1926 – Robert Earl Hughes (world's heaviest man, during his lifetime); 1928 – Ruth Westheimer; 1932 – John Drew Barrymore; 1936 – Bruce Dern; 1937 – Freddy Fender; 1937 – Gorilla Monsoon; 1939 – Henri Pachard (porn director, among other things); 1944 – Michelle Phillips; 1952 – Parker Stevenson; 1954 - Raphael Ravenscroft (saxophone on Gerry Rafferty's
"Baker Street"; 1956 - Reeves Gabrels (The Cure); 1961 – El DeBarge; 1964 – Sean Pertwee (Bruce Wayne's butler/Man Friday
'Alfred' in
"Gotham"); 1968 – Al B. Sure!, Scott Wolf; 1969 – Horatio Sanz; 1971 – Noah Wyle; 1975 – Angelina Jolie; 1978 – Robin Lord Taylor (
'Oswald Cobblepot' (The Penguin) in "Gotham")
Deaths
1942 – Reinhard Heydrich; 1989 – Dik Browne (cartoonist,
Hagar The Horrible &
Hi and Lois); 1992 – Carl Stotz (founder of
Little League Baseball); 1997 – Ronnie Lane; 2004 –
Marvin Heemeyer (Granby, Colorado bulldozer rampage); 2007 – Bill France, Jr. (asshole); 2010 – John Wooden; 2013 – Joey Covington; 2014 – Don Zimmer