TODAY IN HISTORY

1838: Britain’s Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

1863: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Maj. Gen. George G. Meade the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, following the resignation of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker.

1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, were shot to death in Sarajevo by Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip — an act that sparked World War I.

1919: The Treaty of Versailles was signed in France, ending the First World War.

1939: Pan American Airways began regular trans-Atlantic air service with a flight that departed New York for Marseilles, France.

1940: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Alien Registration Act, also known as the Smith Act, which required adult foreigners residing in the U.S. to be registered and fingerprinted. 1950: North Korean forces captured Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

1978: The Supreme Court ordered the University of California-Davis Medical School to admit Allan Bakke, a white man who argued he’d been a victim of reverse racial discrimination.

1994: President Bill Clinton became the first chief executive in U.S. history to set up a personal legal defense fund and ask Americans to contribute to it.

2000: Seven months after he was cast adrift in the Florida Straits, Elian Gonzalez was returned to his native Cuba.

2010: The Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that Americans had the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they lived.

2012: The Affordable Care Act narrowly survived, 5-4, an election-year battle at the U.S. Supreme Court with the improbable help of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise after five years of marriage.

2019: Avowed white supremacist James Alex Fields, who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., killing a young woman and injuring dozens, apologized to his victims before being sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges.