June 14, 1900: Hawaii becomes a U.S. territory.
June 14, 1954: President Dwight David Eisenhower signed a bill into law that inserted “under God” after “one Nation” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
President Eisenhower had been baptized a Presbyterian very recently, only a year before. He said:
“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty… In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.”
The phrase “under God” was incorporated into the Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954, by a Joint Resolution of Congress amending § 4 of the Flag Code enacted in 1942.
The close bond between Christianity and the American presidency began to form in the 1950s. Working together with the Reverend Billy Graham, Dwight Eisenhower shaped a half-century of religion in America. That decade was a time of extraordinary religious revival: Church membership for Americans rose from 49 percent in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960.
As a child, Eisenhower’s life was undeniably shaped by his religious faith. His parents, David and Ida, were members of the River Brethren church in Abilene, Kansas, an off-shoot of the Mennonite faith. Ike’s family life revolved around work and Bible study.
Because the Mennonites did not practice infant baptism, Eisenhower did not formally belong to any religious community. Upon taking office as the 34th president, Eisenhower felt this should change. He quietly approached the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., the denomination to which his wife, Mamie, belonged.
On February 1, 1953, at the age of 62 and just 10 days after his inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized and welcomed into the National Presbyterian Church by the Rev. Edward Elson.
Eisenhower remains the only president ever to have been baptized while in office.
June 15, 1215: King John of England puts his seal to the Magna Carta. It still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as “the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”.
June 16, 1884: The first purpose-built roller coaster, LaMarcus Adna Thompson’s “Switchback Railway”, opens in New York’s Coney Island amusement park.
June 16, 1981: President Ronald Reagan awards the Congressional Gold Medal to Ken Taylor, Canada’s former ambassador to Iran, for helping six Americans escape from Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979–81; he is the first foreign citizen bestowed the honor.
In the movie Argo (2012), Ken Taylor was played by Victor Garber.
June 17, 1631: Mumtaz Mahal dies from postpartum hemorrhage, while giving birth to her 14th child, after a prolonged labor of approximately 30 hours. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, will spend the next 17 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
June 17, 1972: President Richard Nixon’s eventual downfall began with the arrest of five burglars inside the Democratic headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex, after security guard Frank Wills discovered that the door latches had been taped.
1885: The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor aboard the French ship Isere.
June 18, 1178: Five Canterbury monks see what is possibly the Giordano Bruno crater being formed. It is believed that the current oscillations of the Moon’s distance from the Earth (on the order of meters) are a result of this collision.
June 18, 1942: Sir Paul McCartney was born.
June 19, 1978: Garfield, holder of the Guinness World Record for the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip, makes its debut.
June 19, 1865: Union soldiers, led by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, landed in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War had ended and that all slaves were free.
1865 was 2 ½ years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which become official on January 1, 1863.
1910: On the third Sunday in June in 1010 the first Father’s Day was celebrated in the United States.
In the USA, Father’s Day was founded by Sonora Smart Dodd (1882-1978; she was the daughter of American Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart) and celebrated on the third Sunday of June for the first time in 1910. A June date was suggested by Sonora Smart because it was her father’s birthday.
Father’s Day is held on various dates across the world, and different regions maintain their own traditions of honoring fatherhood. In Catholic countries of Europe, Father’s Day has been celebrated on March 19 as Saint Joseph’s Day since the Middle Ages.
June 21, 1964: Civil Rights workers Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James E. Chaney were slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi; their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.
June 21, 2005: Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was found guilty of manslaughter and was sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he died in 2018.
June 23, 1990: the Meech Lake Accord, a detailed package of proposed constitutional amendments, failed to pass in Canada before the three year deadline ran out. Manitoba and Newfoundland did not pass the Accord, which required unanimous consent of the federal Parliament and all ten provinces.
June 24, 2021: A 12-story condominium building in Surfside, Florida, collapsed, killing 98 people.
June 25, 1950: 73°F (23°C) highest temperature ever recorded in Cleveland, Ohio, in January (until then, assumedly)
June 28, 1969: The Stonewall riots: a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the LGBTQ community against a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. They are widely considered to constitute the most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States.
June 29, 1613: The Globe Theatre in London burns to the ground.
June 30, 1905: Albert Einstein sends the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, in which he introduces special relativity, for publication in Annalen der Physik.
June 30, 2009: Bahia Bakari, a French lady then aged 13, became the sole survivor of Yemenia Flight 626, an Airbus A310, which crashed into the Indian Ocean near the north coast of Grande Comore, Comoros. 153 people were aboard the flight and she was the sole survivor.
Bakari, who could barely swim and had no life vest, clung to a piece of aircraft wreckage, floating in heavy seas for over nine hours, much of it in pitch darkness, before being rescued. Her mother, who had been traveling with her from Paris, France, for a summer vacation in Comoros, died in the crash.
The French press dubbed her the miracle girl (la miraculée).
Bahia Bakari has reportedly turned down an offer by Steven Spielberg to make a film based on her book.
According to https://simpleflying.com/yemenia-flight-626-2009-crash-anniversary/amp,
“The accident was caused by inappropriate actions of the crew on the flight controls which brought the aircraft into a stall that could not be recovered. These actions were successive to an unstabilized visual maneuvering, during which many different alarms related to the proximity to the ground, the aircraft configuration and approach to stall sounded. The crew’s attention was focused on the management of the path of the aircraft and the location of the runway, and they probably did not have enough mental resources available in this stressful situation, to respond adequately to different alarms.”