June 4
It’s National Frozen Yogurt Day and Cheese Day and Applesauce Cake Day and Hug Your Cat Day and Old Maid’s Day
ON THIS DAY…
780BC The first historic solar eclipse is recorded in China
1070 Roquefort cheese was accidentally discovered in a cave near Roquefort, France, when a shepherd found a lunch he had forgotten several days before
1391 A mob led by Ferrand Martinez surrounded and set fire to the Jewish quarter of Seville, Spain; the surviving Jews were sold into slavery
1584 Sir Walter Raleigh establishes first English colony on Roanoke Island, old Virginia (now North Carolina)
1615 Forces under the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu take Osaka Castle in Japan
1674 Horse racing was prohibited in Massachusetts
1717 The Freemasons established their Grand Lodge in London; they had begun in the 13th century as a guild of masons, who worked in soft stone called freestone
1783 Brothers Etienne and Joseph Montgolfier make the first public demonstration of a hot air balloon
1792 Captain George Vancouver claims Puget Sound for Great Britain
1812 Following Louisiana’s admittance as a US state, the Louisiana Territory was renamed the Missouri Territory
1825 The first time natural gas was used for illumination was in Fredonia, in western NY
1827 The inaugural cricket match between Oxford University and Cambridge University takes place at the Lord’s ground, London, England
1864 60,000 Union soldiers die during the first month of General Ulysses S. Grant’s command – more Americans than killed in the entire Vietnam War
1872 A process for making vaseline was patented by Robert Chesebrough of New York
1896 In Detroit, Henry Ford test-drives his first automobile, the Quadricycle, a two-cylinder engine mounted on four bicycle wheels that has a top speed of 25 mph
1906 Pathologist Howard T. Ricketts discovered Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is caused by an unusual microbe spread by ticks
1912 Massachusetts becomes the first state of the United States to set a minimum wage
1917 The very first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall receive the first Pulitzer for a biography (for Julia Ward Howe); Jean Jules Jusserand receives the first Pulitzer for history for his work With Americans of Past and Present Days; Herbert B. Swope receives the first Pulitzer for journalism for his work for the New York World
1917 The Order of the British Empire is introduced
1919 The US Congress approves the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed suffrage to women, and sends it to the US states for ratification
1924 An eternal light was dedicated at Madison Square in New York City in memory of all New York soldiers who died in World War I
1929 George Eastman demonstrated the first Technicolor movie
1936 Léon Blum becomes the first Socialist premier of France when he forms a Popular Front coalition government, which introduces a program of extensive social reform
1937 The first shopping carts were introduced at the Humpty Dumpty supermarket in Oklahoma City, invented by the store owner Sylvan Goldman
1939 The SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida after already having been turned away from Cuba; forced to return to Europe, most of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps
1940 Dunkirk evacuation ends; British forces complete evacuation of 300,000 troops from Dunkirk in France
1940 German forces enter Paris
1942 Near the Midway Islands in the Pacific Ocean, American and Japanese air and sea forces begin the three-day Battle of Midway; the American victory there halts Japan’s eastward push
1944 Rome falls to the Allies, the first Axis powers capital to fall
1944 A hunter-killer group of the United States Navy capture the German submarine U-505, marking the first time a US Navy vessel captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century
1948 Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy opens in US movie theaters
1951 Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh wed
1958 Disneyland’s ship Columbia is officially christened on the Rivers of America; Joe Fowler (Disneylands construction supervisor and a former naval admiral) is on hand dressed as a sailing captain of the 1700s, with the Mousketeers appearing as his crew
1962 The first electricity from nuclear fission in Canada was generated at the Nuclear Power Demonstration reactor
1963 The radio program “Pop Go the Beatles” was first broadcast on BBC radio
1963 Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor opens in US movie theaters
1970 Tonga gains independence from the United Kingdom
1973 A patent for the ATM granted to Don Wetzel, Tom Barnes and George Chastain
1975 The discovery of the oldest animal fossils in the US, large narrow marine worms dating back some 620 million years, was reported in North Carolina
1977 Apple II, the first personal computer, went on sale
1982 Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan opened in US movie theaters
1984 The cloning of DNA sequences from an extinct animal was reported from the quagga – a brown, horselike beast with zebra stripes on the front of its body, which inhabited South Africa until it was exterminated by hunters in the early 19th century
1986 Jonathan Pollard pleads guilty to espionage for selling top secret United States military intelligence to Israel
1987 After winning 107 straight times in the 400-meter hurdles, Edwin Moses loses his first race in nearly ten years when Danny Harris outruns him in Madrid, Spain
1989 Months of student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square end after the Chinese army crushes the protests
1992 The US Postal Service announced that people preferred the “younger Elvis” stamp design in a nationwide vote
1997 Married … With Children presented its final episode on FOX
1998 Terry Nichols is sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing
2003 Martha Stewart is indicted under charges including obstruction of justice and securities fraud, stemming from sales of stock in December 2001
2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban opens in US movie theaters
BORN:
1738 George III, King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until 1 January 1801, and thereafter of the United Kingdom, formed by the union of Great Britain and Ireland, until his death; he was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, and the first of Hanover to be born in Britain and speak English as his first language
1756 Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal, chemist who authored the first book on industrial chemistry; he also coined the name “nitrogen”
1877 Heinrich O. Wieland, chemist, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his studies of steroid chemistry in which he determined the molecular structure of bile acids; he is also noted for studying the conversion of food into energy
1889 Beno Gutenberg, seismologist noted for his analyses of earthquake waves and the information they furnish about the physical properties of the Earth’s interior
1907 Rosalind Russell, actress (The Women, His Girl Friday, Mourning Becomes Electra, Picnic, Auntie Mame, Gypsy, The Trouble with Angels)
1924 Dennis Weaver, Emmy Award-winning actor (Gunsmoke, McCloud, Duel, Centennial, Gentle Ben)
1927 Geoffrey Palmer, actor (Butterflies, As Time Goes By, Mrs. Brown, Tomorrow Never Dies, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin)
1928 Dr. Ruth Westheimer, beloved sex therapist and author; during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence she was a scout and sharpshooter
1936 Bruce Dern, actor (Big Love, Wild Bill, Diggstown, Coming Home, Silent Running, The Cowboys)
1937 Freddy Fender (Baldemar Huerta), Tejano, country, and rock and roll musician (“Before the Next Teardrop Falls”, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights”, “Vaya Con Dios”)
1940 David Collings, actor (Doctor Who, Sapphire and Steel, Press Gang, The Ferals, Persuasion)
1944 Michelle Phillips, singer (The Mama’s and the Papa’s) and actress (Knot’s Landing, Hotel, Let it Ride, Sweetwater)
1951 Wendy Pini, best known for her Elfquest series of comics, graphic novels and prose works that she created with her husband
1952 Parker Stevenson, actor (Baywatch, Melrose Place, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, Stroker Ace)
1956 Keith David, actor and Emmy Award-winning voice over artist (Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Gargoyles, Dead Presidents, The Quick and the Dead, The Thing, Platoon)
1964 Sean Pertwee, actor (Prick Up Your Ears, Swing Kids, Cadfael, Tale of the Mummy, Equilibrium, The Mutant Chronicles)
1968 Scott Wolf, actor (Party of Five, The Nine, Everwood, Double Dragon)
1971 Noah Wyle, actor (ER, The Librarian, White Oleander, Donnie Darko, Pirates of Silicon Valley, Swing Kids)
1975 Angelina Jolie, Academy Award-winning actress(Girl, Interrupted, Wanted, Hackers, Foxfire, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow)
1990 Moose, actor, Eddie the Dog on Frasier
DIED:
1798 Giacomo Casanova, adventurer, womanizer and author; a full two centuries after his death, his name remains synonymous with the art of seduction, dies at 73
1941 Emperor Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, dies at 82
1942 Reinhard Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenführer, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (including the Gestapo, SD and Kripo Nazi police agencies) and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, dies at 38 of septicemia eight days after an assignation attempt
1962 William Beebe, biologist, explorer, and writer on natural history who combined careful biological research with a rare literary skill, dies at 84
1967 Lloyd Viel Berkner, physicist and engineer who first measured the extent, including height and density, of the ionosphere (ionized layers of the Earth’s atmosphere), leading to a complete understanding of radio wave propagation and he helped develop radar systems, especially the Distant Early Warning system, dies at 62
1968 Dorothy Gish, prolific actress whose career spanned five decades (Orphans of the Storm, Camille, Nell Gwynne), dies at 70
1997 Ronnie Lane, singer, songwriter and bass player (The Small Faces, The Faces), dies of Multiple Sclerosis at 51