June 23
1972
Title IX of the education amendments of 1972 is enacted into law. Title IX prohibits federally funded educational institutions from discriminating against students or employees based on sex. As a result of Title IX, any school that receives any federal money from the elementary to university level—in short, nearly all schools—must provide fair and equal treatment of the sexes in all areas, including athletics. Before Title IX, few opportunities existed for female athletes. The NCAA offered no athletic scholarships for women and held no championships for women’s teams. Title IX has enabled women’s participation in sports to grow exponentially. It is also credited with decreasing the dropout rate of girls from high school and increasing the number of women who pursue higher education.
1991
John Gotti, nicknamed the “Teflon Don” after escaping unscathed from several trials during the 1980s, was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty on 14 accounts of conspiracy to commit murder and racketeering. Gotti became head of the powerful Gambino family after boss Paul Castellano was murdered outside a steakhouse in Manhattan in December 1985. The gang assassination was organized by Gotti and his colleague Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. Despite wide publicity of his criminal activities, Gotti avoided conviction through witness intimidation. In 1990, however, he was indicted for the murder of Paul Castellano, and Gravano agreed to testify against him in a federal district court in exchange for a reduced prison sentence.
2013
34-year-old aerialist Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk a high wire across the LittleColorado River Gorge near Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and holding a 43-pound balancing pole, he prayed out loud as he walked untethered across a 1,400-foot-long, 8.5-ton cable suspended 1,500 feet above the Little Colorado River. It was the highest walk of his career up to that point, and he completed it in just less than 23 minutes. In June of the previous year, Wallenda, a member of the famous Flying Wallendas family of circus performers, became the first person to walk a tightrope over Niagara Walls. In his lifetime, he has set a number of Guinness World Records, including the longest tightrope crossing on a bicycle and the highest eight-person tightrope pyramid.
June 24
1971
In an attempt to curtail President Nixon's power to continue the Vietnam War, the Senate voted 81 to 10 to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. After North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked U.S. destroyers (in what became known as the Tonkin Gulf incident) in 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed and gave President Johnson the power to take whatever actions he deemed necessary, including “the use of armed force." The Nixon administration asserted that it primarily drew on the constitutional authority of the president as commander-in-chief to protect the lives of U.S. military forces in justifying its actions and policies in prosecuting the war.
LSU center Shaquille "Shaq" O'Neal was drafted the first overall pick by Orlando Magic. He quickly became one of the best centers in the league, winning Rookie of the Year in 1992-93 and leading his team to the 1995 NBA Finals. He would go onto win three NBA Championships with the Los Angeles Lakers (2000, 2001, 2002) and one with the Miami Heat (2006). O'Neal's individual accolades also include the 1999–2000 Most Valuable Player (MVP) Award, 15 All-Star Game selections, three All-Star Game MVP awards, three Finals MVP awards; two scoring titles, 14 All-NBA team selections, and three NBA All-Defensive Team selections.
1997
U.S. Air Force officials released a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier. The document stated definitively that there was no Pentagon evidence that any kind of life form was found in the Roswell area in connection with the reported UFO sightings. However, furious ufologists rushed to point out the report’s inconsistencies. With conspiracy theories still alive and well on the Internet, Roswell continues to thrive as a tourist destination for UFO enthusiasts far and wide, hosting the annual UFO Encounter Festival each July and welcoming visitors year-round to its International UFO Museum and Research Center.
June 25
1876
Native American forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated the U.S. Army troops of General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, Lakota Sioux leaders, strongly resisted the mid-19th-century efforts of the U.S. government to confine their people to reservations. In 1875, after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the U.S. Army ignored previous treaty agreements and invaded the region. The battle marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. However, almost all of the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne would be confined to reservations within five years.
1950
An American Team composed largely of amateurs defeated its more polished English opponents at the World Cup, held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Dubbed the "Miracle on Green," the game is considered one of the greatest soccer upsets of all time. The English team was known as the “Kings of Football" and boasted a record of 23 victories, four losses and three draws in the years since WWII ended. The American team, by contrast, had lost their last seven international matches and was assembled just days before the match. After the upset, both teams were quickly eliminated. It would be 16 years before England won its first and only World Cup title. The United States, meanwhile, would not even appear in the tournament again until 1990.
1950
The Korean began when armed forces from communist North Korea smash into South Korea, setting off the Korean War. The United States, acting under the auspices of the United Nations, quickly sprang to the defense of South Korea and fought a bloody and frustrating war for the next three years. Over 55,000 American troops were killed in the conflict. Korea was the first “limited war,” one in which the U.S. aim was not the complete and total defeat of the enemy, but rather the “limited” goal of protecting South Korea. It proved to be a frustrating experience for the American people, who found the concept of limited war difficult to understand and the Korean War never really gained popular support.
June 26
1945
In the Herbst Theater auditorium in San Francisco, delegates from 50 nations sign the United Nations Charter, establishing the world body as a means of saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war." The idea of the United Nations began to be articulated in August 1941, when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, which proposed a set of principles for international collaboration in maintaining peace and security. Later that year, Roosevelt coined “United Nations” to describe the nations allied against the Axis powers–Germany, Italy and Japan.
1959
In a ceremony presided over by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II, the St. Lawrence Seaway was officially opened, creating a navigational channel from the Atlantic Ocean to all the Great Lakes. The seaway, made up of a system of canals, locks, and dredged waterways, extends a distance of nearly 2,500 miles, from the Atlantic Ocean through the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Duluth, Minnesota, on Lake Superior. Since its official opening, more than two billion tons of cargo, with an estimated worth of more than $300 billion, have moved along its canals and channels.
2003
Strom Thurmond, who served in the US Senate for a record 46 years, died. Thurmond’s long and controversial political career had ended with his retirement one year earlier. Thurmond’s political career began in 1946 when he became governor of South Carolina. As governor, as well as in the early part of his Congressional career, he was famously pro-segregation. Although it is unknown whether his personal beliefs regarding racial equality ever changed, his political behavior became more moderate in the 1970s. This change of heart, whether genuine or not, was exemplified by his endorsement of a renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and his vote in favor of creating the Martin Luther King, Jr. federal holiday in 1983.
June 27
1829
The Smithsonian Institute was established when English scientist James Smithson died, leaving behind a will saying his estate would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Smithson’s bequest was curious considering he had never visited America. Today, the Smithsonian is composed of 19 museums, nine research centers throughout the US and the world and the national zoo. The National Air and Space Museum is the most visited museum in the world, exhibiting marvels of aviation and space history such as the Wright brothers' plane and Freedom 7, the space capsule that took the first American into space.
1922
The American Library Association (ALA) awarded the first Newbery Medal, honoring the year’s best children’s book, to The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon. The idea for an award honoring outstanding contributions to children’s literature came from Frederic G. Melcher, a former bookseller who in 1918 became an editor of Publisher’s Weekly. Over his long career, Melcher often looked for ways to encourage reading, especially among children. Two years later, Melcher suggested the creation of a children’s book award at a June 1921 meeting of the Children’s Librarians’ Section of the ALA. He proposed that it should be named for John Newbery, the 18th-century English bookseller and author who was considered the father or ”inventor” of children’s literature.
1950
President Harry S. Truman announced that he is ordering U.S. air and naval forces to South Korea to aid the democratic nation in repulsing an invasion by communist North Korea. The United States was undertaking the major military operation, he explained, to enforce a United Nations resolution calling for an end to hostilities, and to stem the spread of communism in Asia. In addition to ordering U.S. forces to Korea, Truman also deployed the U.S. 7th Fleet to Formosa (Taiwan) to guard against invasion by communist China and ordered an acceleration of military aid to French forces fighting communist guerrillas in Vietnam.
June 28
1953
Workers at a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, assembled the first Corvette, a two-seater sports car that would become an American icon. The first completed production car rolled off the assembly line two days later, one of just 300 Corvettes made that year. The idea for the Corvette originated with General Motors’ pioneering designer Harley J. Earl, who in 1951 began developing plans for a low-cost American sports car that could compete with Europe’s MGs, Jaguars and Ferraris. While sales were initially lackluster, survival came when it was equipped with the more powerful V-8 engine in 1955. Its performance and appeal steadily improved and it went on to earn the nickname “America’s sports car."
1969
In what is now regarded by many as history’s first major protest on behalf of equal rights for LGBTQ people, a police raid of the Stonewall Inn—a popular gay club located on New York City's Christopher Street—turned violent as patrons and local sympathizers begin rioting against the authorities. Although the police were legally justified in raiding the club, which was serving liquor without a license among other violations, New York’s gay community had grown weary of the police department targeting gay clubs, many of which had already been closed. In 2019, the New York Police Department formally apologized for its role in the Stonewall Riots, and for the discriminatory laws that targeted gay people.
2007
The Bald Eagle was removed from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife; once close to vanishing from North America around the middle of the 20th century, the de-listing program was one of the most notable wildlife rehabilitation efforts in American history. Sacred to some Indigenous American cultures, the bald eagle is the national bird of the United States and features prominently in its iconography. Despite its significance, the bird's population declined rapidly over the first half of the 20th century. The overall population in the lower 48 states, estimated to have been around 400,000 in the 1700s, had declined to fewer than 1,000 by the 1950s.
June 29
1776
Edward Rutledge, one of South Carolina’s representatives to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, expressed his reluctance to declare independence from Britain in a letter to the like-minded John Jay of New York. Contrary to the majority of his Congressional colleagues, Rutledge advocated patience with regards to declaring independence. At age 26, Edward Rutledge was the youngest American to literally risk his neck by signing The Declaration of Independence. He would go on to serve as Governor of South Carolina.
1967
Celebrated actress Jayne Mansfield was killed instantly when the car in which she is riding strikes the rear of a trailer truck on U.S. Route 90 east of New Orleans. Her three children with ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, eight-year-old Mickey, six-year-old Zoltan and three-year-old Mariska, survived with minor injuries. Mansfield came to Hollywood to become an actress in 1954 and wasn’t afraid to make the most of her assets, particularly her curvaceous figure, flowing platinum blonde hair and dazzling smile. While her screen career amounted to about a dozen less-than-memorable films, off screen she played the movie star role to perfection, and became one of the most visible glamour girls of the era.
1995
The American space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir to form the largest man-made satellite ever to orbit the Earth. This historic moment of cooperation between former rival space programs was also the 100th human space mission in American history. At the time, Daniel Goldin, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), called it the beginning of “a new era of friendship and cooperation” between the U.S. and Russis. With millions of viewers watching on television, Atlantis blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in eastern Florida. NASA’s Shuttle-Mir program continued for 11 missions and was a crucial step towards the construction of the International Space Statin now in orbit.