Today’s highlight in history
On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving vs. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
On this date
In 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted a Declaration of Rights.
In 1939, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, N.Y.
In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.
In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Miss. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)
In 1979, 26-year-old cyclist Bryan Allen flew the human-powered Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
In 1997, baseball began regular-season interleague play, ending a 126-year tradition of separating the major leagues until the World Series. (In the first game played under this arrangement, the San Francisco Giants defeated the Texas Rangers 4-3.)
Ten years ago: Justin Verlander pitched a no-hitter to lead the Detroit Tigers over the Milwaukee Brewers, 4-0.
Five years ago: Elinor Ostrom, 78, an Indiana University political scientist who to date is the only woman to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, died in Bloomington, Ind.
One year ago: An American-born Muslim opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, a gay establishment in Orlando, Fla., leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded before being shot dead by police. The mass shooting cast a pall over that evening’s Tony Awards, where “Hamilton,” the hip-hop stage biography of Alexander Hamilton, won the 2016 prize for best new musical.