This Day in History

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June 15

763 BC – Assyrians record a solar eclipse that is later used to fix the chronology of Mesopotamian history.

1215 – King John of England puts his seal to the Magna Carta.

1219 – Northern Crusades: Danish victory at the Battle of Lyndanisse (modern-day Tallinn) establishes the Danish Duchy of Estonia. According to legend, this battle also marks the first use of the Dannebrog, the world's oldest national flag still in use, as the national flag of Denmark.

1300 – The city of Bilbao, Spain is founded.

1648 – Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1667 – The first human blood transfusion is administered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys.

1752 – Benjamin Franklin proves that lightning is electricity (traditional date, the exact date is unknown).

1775 – American Revolutionary War: George Washington is appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

1816 – At the Villa Diodati in the village of Cologny, Switzerland, Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests — Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori — and challenges each guest to write a ghost story, which culminates in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing an unfinished vampire novel Fragment of a Novel and the poem Darkness.

1836 – Arkansas is admitted as the 25th U.S. state.

1844 – Charles Goodyear receives a patent for vulcanization, a process to strengthen rubber.

1864 – Arlington National Cemetery is established when 200 acres (0.81 km2) around Arlington Mansion (formerly owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee) are officially set aside as a military cemetery by U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

1877 – Henry Ossian Flipper becomes the first African American cadet to graduate from the United States Military Academy.

1878 – Eadweard Muybridge takes a series of photographs to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs; the study becomes the basis of motion pictures.

1896 – The deadliest tsunami in Japan's history kills more than 22,000 people.

1904 – A fire aboard the steamboat SS General Slocum in New York City's East River kills 1,000 people.

1916 – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America, making them the only American youth organization with a federal charter.

1934 – The U.S. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is founded.

1944 – World War II: Battle of Saipan: The United States invade Japanese-occupied Saipan.

1970 – Charles Manson goes on trial for the Sharon Tate murders.

1991 – In the Philippines, Mount Pinatubo erupts in the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th Century. In the end, over 800 people die.

1992 – The United States Supreme Court rules in United States v. Álvarez-Machaín that it is permissible for the United States to forcibly extradite suspects in foreign countries and bring them to the USA for trial, without approval from those other countries.

1996 – The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonates a powerful truck bomb in the middle of Manchester, England, devastating the city centre and injuring 200 people.

Births

1330 – Edward, the Black Prince; 1908 – Sam Giancana; 1914 – Yuri Andropov; 1917 – Lash LaRue; 1930 – Victor Lundin (Star Trek's first Klingon); 1932 – Mario Cuomo; 1937 – Waylon Jennings; 1941 – Harry Nilsson; 1943 – Johnny Hallyday, Xaviera Hollander; 1946 – Noddy Holder; 1947 – John Hoagland; 1948 – Mike Holmgren; 1949 – Dusty Baker, Russell Hitchcock, Jim Varney (Ernest); 1951 – Steve Walsh; 1954 – Jim Belushi; 1955 – Julie Hagerty; 1957 – Brad Gillis; 1958 – Wade Boggs; 1963 – Helen Hunt; 1964 – Courteney Cox; 1969 – Ice Cube; 1972 – Andy Pettitte; 1973 – Neil Patrick Harris; 1980 – Mary Carey; 1984 – Tim Lincecum

Deaths

1849 – James K. Polk; 1968 – Wes Montgomery; 1989 – Victor French; 1991 – Happy Chandler; 1996 – Ella Fitzgerald; 2003 – Hume Cronyn; 2014 – Casey Kasem; 2015 – Kirk Kerkorian; 2015 – Mighty Sam McClain