THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― JUNE 19

June 19 is the 170th day of the year (171st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 195 days remaining until the end of the year.  

NATIONAL MARTINI DAY (Shaken, not stirred)

1269 – King Louis IX of France orders all Jews found in public without an identifying yellow badge to be fined ten livres of silver.

1586 – English colonists leave Roanoke Island, after failing to establish England's first permanent settlement in North America. They returned to England with Sir Francis Drake headed to England after a successful raid in the Caribbean,

1846 – The first officially recorded, organized baseball game is played under Alexander Cartwright's rules on Hoboken, New Jersey's Elysian Fields with the New York Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbockers 23–1. Cartwright umpired. ―  From state.nj.us/nj/about/baseball.html

1862 – The U.S. Congress prohibits slavery in United States territories, nullifying Dred Scott v. Sandford. ― From freedmen.umd.edu/freeterr.htm

1865 – Over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Galveston, Texas, United States, are finally informed of their freedom. The anniversary is still officially celebrated in Texas and 41 other contiguous states as Juneteenth.

1867 – Maximilian I of the Second Mexican Empire is executed by a firing squad in Querétaro, Querétaro.

1910 – The first Father's Day is celebrated in Spokane, Washington.

1934 – The Communications Act of 1934 establishes the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Act replaced the Federal Radio Commission with the Federal Communications Commission(FCC). It also transferred regulation of interstate telephone services from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the FCC. On January 3, 1996, the 104th Congress of the United States amended or repealed sections of the Communications Act of 1934 with the new Telecommunications Act of 1996. It was the first major overhaul of American telecommunications policyin nearly 62 years.

1944 – World War II: First day of the Battle of the Philippine Sea. It was a decisive naval battle of World War II that eliminated the Imperial Japanese Navy's ability to conduct large-scale carrier actions. It took place during the United States' amphibious invasion of the Mariana Islands during the Pacific War. The battle was the last of five major "carrier-versus-carrier" engagements between American and Japanese naval forces, and involved elements of the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet as well as ships and land-based aircraft from the Imperial Japanese Navy's Mobile Fleet and nearby island garrisons.

1953 – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing, in New York. Leftists in the U.S. fervently maintained the Rosenbergs were innocent but Russian archives opened after the fall of the Soviet Union proved conclusively they were, in fact, Soviet spies. ― From history.com/this-day-in-history/julius-and-ethel-rosenberg-executed

1964 – The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster (by Southern Democrats) in the United States Senate. It outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public (known as "public accommodations").

1982 – In one of the first militant attacks by Hezbollah, David S. Dodge, president of the American University of Beirut, is kidnapped, flown to a prison near Tehran, and held until his release exactly one year later. "The kidnapping, and the ensuing diplomatic efforts to secure Mr. Dodge’s release, received worldwide news coverage." The Syrian government helped secure his release from Iran, after being held initially in Lebanon. The kidnapping was considered significant because it directly implicated Iran in the hostage-taking activities of Shiite factions in Lebanon. Dodge was one of the first Americans kidnapped.

1985 – Members of the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, dressed as Salvadoran soldiers, attack the Zona Rosa area of San Salvador.

1990 – The Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic is founded in Moscow.

2007 – The al-Khilani Mosque bombing in Baghdad leaves 78 people dead and another 218 injured. The explosion occurred just two days after a four-day curfew banning vehicle movement in the city was lifted after the al-Askari Mosque bombing (2007), and just hours after 10,000 US troops began the Arrowhead Ripper offensive to the north of Baghdad. Because the site was a Shia mosque, the bombing is presumed to have been the work of Sunnis.

2009 – Mass riots involving over 10,000 people and 10,000 police officers break out in Shishou, China, over the dubious circumstances surrounding the death of 24-year-old chef Tu Yuangao. Although local police claimed Tu's death was a suicide, some believed foul play was involved and crowds were angered by what they alleged to be cronyism, drug trafficking, and lack of transparency from the city's top officials. The number of people in the protest may have been as high as 70,000. According to one source, “In a 2009 riot in Shishou, in Hubei Province, 70,000 people confronted police officers in what the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-affiliated think tank, considered to be 'the most serious street riot' since 1949.”


2009 – War in North-West Pakistan: The Pakistani Armed Forces open Operation Rah-e-Nijat against the Taliban and other Islamist rebels in the South Waziristan area of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

2012 – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange requested asylum in London's Ecuadorian Embassy for fear of extradition to the US after publication of previously classified documents including footage of civilian killings by the US army.

BORN TODAY

1623 – Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and physicist, also worked with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory (d. 1662)

1833 – Mary Tenney Gray, American editorial writer, club-woman, philanthropist, and suffragette (d. 1904)

1854 – Eleanor Norcross, American painter (d. 1923)

1897 – Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, English chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate for kinetics research (d. 1967)

1910 – Abraham "Abe" Fortas, American lawyer and jurist (d. 1982)

1926 – Erna Schneider Hoover, American mathematician and inventor

1945 – Radovan Karadžić, Serbian-Bosnian politician and convicted war criminal, 1st President of Republika Srpska

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.