“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” —Mark Twain
June 14
1381 – For the first time in history, a hostile force captures the Tower of London, led by Wat Tyler. Wat Tyler led the Peasants’ Revolt in England, the originating factors of which included harsh economic times brought on by the Black Death and onerous taxes. Unfortunately, the peasants did execute the Archbishop of Canterbury; also unfortunately, no good came from the revolt. While King Richard II met with the peasants and initially made concessions, the elitist mayor of London, galled by Tyler over-confident demands of the king, killed Tyler. The king subsequently had some hundreds of the rebels executed and refused to go through with any of the concessions he had made.
1645 – The English Parliamentary troops under Oliver Cromwell win a victory over the Royalists at the Battle of Naseby. King Charles I would eventually be executed and Cromwell would take over England as dictator.
1775 – Considered the birthday of the U.S. Army. The Continental Congress “Resolved, That six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia… [and] as soon as completed, shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.” The next day, George Washington was appointed commander-in-chief. Read my article for the 250th anniversary of the Army.
1777 – “Flag Day”: The Second Continental Congress adopts the flag we now know as the “Stars and Stripes” to be the official flag of the United States. It is believed that Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, designed the flag. Betsy Ross sewed the first flag at the request of the Congress.
1801 – Benedict Arnold, most infamous traitor in American history, dies in England. Originally a daring officer for the American Revolutionaries, and particularly beloved by George Washington, Arnold’s greed, arrogance, impatience, and Loyalist wife all contributed to cause him to defect to the British. When he learned of Arnold’s loathsome betrayal, Washington was crushed, and exclaimed to aides Hamilton and Lafayette, “Whom can we trust now?” Arnold had planned to surrender the West Point fort to the British, but his treachery was fortunately discovered in time. Arnold served with the British during the remainder of the Revolution and later engaged in both business and privateering before dying in London.
1811 – Authoress Harriet Beecher Stowe is born in Connecticut. Her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a massive impact on American culture and helped spur the abolitionist movement. The novel was a major best-seller in both England and the U.S., with 300,000 copies sold just in the first year in America. When he met Stowe during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is said to have commented, “So this is the little lady who started this Great War.”
1864 – Pioneering German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer is born.
1898 – The Battle of Cuzco Well, a victory for U.S. Marines and Cuban rebels against Spanish forces during the Spanish-American War.
1928 – Argentinian Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, a major figure in the disastrous Cuban Revolution, is born. He was a racist, womanizing, vicious mass murderer who enjoyed killing people.
1940 – Nazi troops occupy Paris during WWII. Millions of Parisians fled, and soon “arrests, interrogations, and spying were the order of the day, as a swastika flew above the Arc de Triomphe.”
1941 – During WWII, “more than 10,000 Estonians were exiled to Siberia by the Soviet Union.”
1946 – Donald Trump, future president of the United States, is born.
June 15
763 BC – The city of Nineveh, in the Assyrian empire, experiences a full solar eclipse. Considered a significant and ominous event in Assyrian records.
1215 – King John, under duress from barons, signs the Magna Carta. “By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law and documenting the liberties held by ‘free men,’ the Magna Carta provided the foundation for individual rights in Anglo-American jurisprudence.”
1219 – “[Denmark] In the early 13th century, the Danish king Valdemar Sejr (Valdemar the Victorious) led his army on a crusade in present-day Estonia. During a battle on June 15, 1219, the Danes were on the defensive when suddenly a red banner with a white cross fell from the sky. As a result, the luck changed, the Danish army won, and Denmark got its flag.”
1330 – Edward the “Black Prince” of England, a key figure in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, is born. “His military prowess and chivalric reputation made him an exemplar of medieval knighthood, embodying both the virtues and the violence of his era.”
1467 – Philip “the Good”, most influential of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy, founder of the Burgundian state that proved to be a rival to France, dies.
1775 – George Washington is appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. He would prove to be the indispensable man in achieving victory during the American Revolution. Washington declined a salary, asking only for reimbursement of expenses. “I am truly sensible of the high Honor done me in this Appointment… I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with,” he said in his acceptance speech.
1849 – James K. Polk, U.S. president during the Mexican-American War who therefore oversaw the expansion of America, dies.
1953 – Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist dictator currently overseeing one of history’s worst dictatorships, is born.
June 16
1487 – The Battle of Stoke Field happens in England, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. The newly crowned Yorkist contender for the throne, King Edward VI, and his allies face off against the Tudor usurper Henry VII, who defeated the Yorkists and solidified his dynastic rule over England.
1779 – Spain declares war on Great Britain in support of the Americans during the American Revolution, launching the Great Siege of Gibraltar that would go on for three and a half years and be the largest engagement of the Revolution in terms of numbers, involving besieging French and Spanish and defending British troops. The British did manage to hold onto Gibraltar but, of course, not the American colonies.
1829 – Estimated date of the birth of famed Apache war chief Geronimo, who terrorized settlers and spent decades fighting U.S. and Mexican forces.
1858 – Attorney and former congressman Abraham Lincoln is declared the “first and only choice” for the new, anti-slavery political party’s senatorial candidacy at the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield. Lincoln delivers his famous, Biblically-based “House Divided” speech. “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln stated. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” He would go on to lose the Senatorial election but soon after win a more important election—to the presidency.
1958 – Imre Nagy, Hungarian premier and leader of an unsuccessful rebellion against Soviet rule, is executed.
1977 – Scientist Wernher von Braun dies. A Nazi rocketry expert who worked for Hitler, he later surrendered to American troops and went on to suffer no punishment for his dedicated service to the genocidal regime, as the U.S. government brought him over to work for NASA’s space program. He received honors from the U.S. and societies worldwide for his work, and we can only hope he received more objective justice in the next life.
June 17
1462 – Wallachian (Romanian) leader Vlad III, also known as Vlad the Impaler (the inspiration for the character of Dracula), surprises and terrifies his Turkish enemies. While Vlad did not succeed in killing Turkish leader Mehmed II as he aimed to do, he did end up scaring the Turks out of his domains. Vlad was the unlikely and imperfect champion who saved that area of Christian Europe from the bloodthirsty Muslim invaders.
1527 – Reported date on which Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sets off to explore Florida.
1631 – “Mumtaz Mahal, the beloved wife of [India’s] Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, died while giving birth to their fourteenth child in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh. Thereafter, Shah Jahan spent more than twenty years building the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved wife.”
1775 – “The American patriots were defeated at the Battle of Bunker Hill, but they proved they could hold their own against the superior British Army.”
1789 – Radical members of the Third Estate (from the French Estates General) adopt the title of National Assembly, an entity that would go on to be the French Revolutionary governing body that became an agent of terrorism and mass murdering oppression.
1856 – The first national convention of the then-new Republican Party begins. The Republicans were specifically anti-slavery, and though most of their members were from the North or West, there were also delegates from the South.
1882 – Russian composer Igor Stravinsky is born.
June 18
618 – Reported date on which military commander Li Yuan is crowned as Emperor Gaozu of China, the dawn of the Tang Dynasty.
1155 – Pope Adrian IV crowns Frederick Barbarossa as Holy Roman Emperor.
1812 – President James Madison signs the Congressional act of war against Great Britain into law and the War of 1812 begins. Among the factors leading to the U.S. declaring war were Brits’ forcible induction of American seamen into the British Navy, Britain’s economic blockade of France, and British support for Great Lakes native tribes.
1815 – The Battle of Waterloo occurs between resurgent French Emperor Napoleon and allied Dutch, Belgian, German, and British troops under the Duke of Wellington, also Prussians under Von Blucher. It was Napoleon’s final and decisive defeat, and ended his Hundred Days of restoration to power after his first exile.
1901 – Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov, daughter of the last czar of Russia, is born. She and her family were brutally massacred by Communist Bolshevik radicals under the evil Lenin in 1918. For many years, it was rumored that she had somehow survived the massacre, and a number of women even claimed to be Anastasia. Her remains have since been forensically identified, but the myth of the last of the Romanovs continues to be commemorated on stage and in film.
1940 – French General Charles de Gaulle gives a speech over BBC radio in England sparking French resistance against Nazi occupation as he declared “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.”
1940 – During WWII, following the fall of France to the Nazis, new British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gives his famous “Their Finest Hour” speech to the House of Commons. He ended:
‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’
June 19
1179 – Rebel and future king of Norway Sverre Sigurdsson wins a victory at the Battle of Kalvskinnet over the king’s forces.
1269 – Reported date on which King Louis IX of France orders that all Jews wear a yellow badge in public.
1306 – King Robert the Bruce of Scotland is defeated by the Earl of Pembroke at the Battle of Methven.
1566 – James, later James I of Great Britain, is born in Scotland, only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her second husband. Separated from his mother while young, he abandoned her Catholic faith to be a Protestant and successor of the vicious Queen Elizabeth I. James followed Elizabeth’s example in harshly persecuting Catholics.
1623 – Blaise Pascal, author of the famous philosophical work Penseés, is born in France.
1786 – American Revolutionary hero Nathanael Greene dies. “General Nathanael Green was an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He was one of George Washington’s most trusted officers and led American forces to a strategic victory in the Southern Campaign.”
1861 – Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig is born in Edinburgh. He ‘was a British field marshal, commander in chief of the British forces in France during most of World War I. His strategy of attrition (tautly summarized as “kill more Germans”) resulted in enormous numbers of British casualties but little immediate gain in 1916–17 and made him a subject of controversy.’
1862 – During the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s administration, slavery is abolished in all U.S. territories:
‘Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.’
1903 – Yankee player and baseball Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig is born.
1944 – The naval Battle of the Philippine Sea during WWII begins, as the Japanese attempt to win a decisive victory over the Americans. Instead, the decisive victory went to the Americans.
For the main historical events of June 20, including the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, Barbary Pirates, King Philip’s War, the Battle of Cuddalore, the start of the French Revolution, Queen Victoria, Wolfe Tone, the KKK trials of 1871, and the Boxer Rebellion, read my previous piece.
Did I miss any important events? Let me know in the comments.
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Author: Catherine Salgado
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