May 30, 1922 (100 year ago, today): The Lincoln Memorial is dedicated by Chief Justice William Howard Taft. Lincoln’s only surviving son, 78-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln, is in attendance.
Express trains in the 19th century generally did not make local stops, but would sometimes do so for special groups. An express train in Ohio once got a telegram asking it to stop at a small country station to pick up a large party. When it stopped, William Howard Taft, then a young lawyer, got on by himself. The puzzled conductor said they were expecting a large party. « I am the large party » said the burly Taft.
May 31, 1889: The South Fork Dam fails catastrophically, causing a 60-ft. wall of water and debris to engulf the town of Johnstown, Pa., and the death of more than 2,200 people.
Addendum:
Not all the deaths in the Johnstown Flood were due to drowning. A large quantity of debris was trapped by a viaduct of the Pennsylvania Railway, known as the Stone Bridge. and eventually caught fire. At least eighty people who had taken refuge on the bridge died in the resulting inferno which, due to the massive amount of debris as well as the destruction of all infrastructure including fire-fighting equipment, burned for three days.
-“BB”-
June 1, 1495: A monk, John Cor, records the first known batch of Scotch whiskey.
June 1, 1950, The Chinchanga fire starts in Rose Prairie BC (30km N of Fort St. John BC, and 100km N of Dawson Creek BC). It spread to the northeast and burned for over four months, reaching Keg River AB almost 200km away. With a final size of up to 4,200,000 acres, it is the single largest recorded fire in North American history.
June 1, 2009: AF447, Air France flight 447, Rio to Paris, crashes in the Atlantic just north of the equator between Brazil and Senegal killing all 228 passengers and crew aboard. Two bodies were recovered within five days, but the black boxes were not recovered until May 2011. The accident is the deadliest in the history of Air France, as well as the deadliest aviation accident involving the Airbus A330.
On June 1, 1945, the first group of Berlin women start clearing the rubble of World War II. Men make a mess of everything and women have to fix it. Sounds about right. LOL
June 2, 1953: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, who is crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Her Other Realms and Territories & Head of the Commonwealth, the first major international event to be televised*.
*and watched by 6yo Panache45.
June 3, 1943: In Los Angeles, white U.S. Navy sailors and Marines clash with Latino youths in the “Zoot Suit Riots”.
June 3, 2016: “The Greatest” dies of septic shock. Muhammad Ali died in a hospital at the age of 74. He was born on 17 January 1942.
June 4,1939: The MS St. Louis is denied permission to land in Florida, then Canada, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps.
June 4, 1984: Born in the U.S.A. is the seventh studio album by American rock singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen. It was released by Columbia Records on June 4, 1984. The album’s music was written by Springsteen and recorded with his E Street Band and producers Chuck Plotkin and Jon Landau at The Power Station and The Hit Factory in New York City over the course of several years.
June 4, 1989: The unknown “Tank Man” in Beijing’s Tiananmen square single-handedly halts a column of tanks.
June 5, 1981: The “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that five people in Los Angeles have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS.
By 2022, over 80 million people have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic.
June 6, 1944: The Battle of Normandy begins. D-Day, code named Operation Overlord, commences with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France. The allied soldiers quickly break through the Atlantic Wall and push inland in the largest amphibious military operation in history.
June 6, 1916: The National Day of Sweden
The tradition of celebrating this date began in 1916 at the Stockholm Olympic Stadium, in honor of the election of King Gustav Vasa on 6 June 1523, as this was considered the foundation of modern Sweden.
In 2005, it became an official Swedish public holiday, replacing Whit Monday. Whit Monday or Pentecost Monday, also known as Monday of the Holy Spirit, is the holiday celebrated the day after Pentecost, a moveable feast in the Christian liturgical calendar. It is moveable because it is determined by the date of Easter.
From The National Day of Sweden | sweden.se (retrieved 2022-06-06):
National Day with waving flags and royals.
Normally, the King and Queen of Sweden take part in a ceremony at Skansen, Stockholm’s open-air museum, on the National Day. The yellow and blue Swedish flag is run up the mast, and children in traditional peasant costume present the royal couple with bouquets of summer flowers.
Special ceremonies welcoming new Swedish citizens are also usually held around the country on National Day.
The beginnings
The last time people in general took an active interest in Sweden as a nation-state was at the turn of the century (around 1900, that is) when national-romantic winds were blowing through the country and folklore societies and local history museums were established.
It was then that 6 June first became a day of celebration.
June 7, 1899: Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments, by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.
June 7, 1991: Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines. Magma had been rising in April and May, but on 07 June the magma reached its surface, oozing out to form a lava dome but not exploding.
On 12 June millions of cubic yards of gas-charged magma reached the surface and exploded in the reawakening volcano’s first spectacular eruption.
On 15 June the volcano exploded in a cataclysmic eruption that ejected more than 1.2 cubic miles of material. The ash cloud from this climactic eruption rose 22 miles into the atmosphere. Huge pyroclastic flows roared down the flanks of Mount Pinatubo, filling once-deep valleys with fresh volcanic deposits as much as 660 ft thick. The eruption removed so much magma and rock from below the volcano that the summit collapsed to form a 1.6 mile wide caldera. Annual monsoon rains filled the caldera to form a crater lake, Lake Pinatubo.
Lake Pinatubo picture:
June 8, 1988: Nippon Airways announces that painting eyeballs on Jets cut bird collisions by 20%.