TODAY IN HISTORY

1775: George Washington was commissioned by the Continental Congress as commander in chief of the Continental Army.

1865: Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War was over, and that all remaining slaves in Texas were free — an event celebrated to this day as “Juneteenth.”

1910: The first-ever Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane, Wash. (The idea for the observance is credited to Sonora Louise Smart Dodd.)

1911: Pennsylvania became the first state to establish a motion picture censorship board.

1917: During World War I, King George V ordered the British royal family to dispense with German titles and surnames; the family took the name “Windsor.”

1934: The Federal Communications Commission was created; it replaced the Federal Radio Commission.

1944: During World War II, the two-day Battle of the Philippine Sea began, resulting in a decisive victory for the Americans over the Japanese.

1953: Julius Rosenberg, 35, and his wife, Ethel, 37, convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, N.Y.

1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved by the U.S. Senate, 73-27, after surviving a lengthy filibuster.

1975: Former Chicago organized crime boss Sam Giancana was shot to death in the basement of his home in Oak Park, Ill.; the killing has never been solved.

1986: University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, the first draft pick of the Boston Celtics, suffered a fatal cocaine-induced seizure.

1987: The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law requiring any public school teaching the theory of evolution to teach creation science as well.

2014: Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield won election as House majority leader as Republicans shuffled their leadership in the wake of Rep. Eric Cantor’s primary defeat in Virginia.

2017: Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old American college student released by North Korea in a coma after more than a year in captivity, died in a Cincinnati hospital.