ON THIS DAY JUNE 4

1070 Roquefort cheese is created in a cave near Roquefort-sur-soulzon, France.

1411 King Charles VI of France grants a monopoly for the ripening of Roquefort cheese to Roquefort-sur-soulzon.

1783 The Montgolfier brothers demonstrate their hot air balloon.

1784 Elisabeth Thible becomes the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon. 1917 The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded. 1920 Hungary loses 71% of its territory and 63% of its population when the Treaty of Trianon, which ends World War I, is signed. 1928 The Republic of China’s president is assassinated by Japanese agents.

1939 The MS St Louis, carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, having been already turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers die in Nazi concentration camps.

1940 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill orders the Royal Navy back to Dunkirk to rescue the 26 000 French troops who had covered the evacuation of the trapped British Expeditionary Force. During the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’, 338 000 allied troops were plucked from under the Germans’ noses by a flotilla of more than 800 vessels, many of them small craft manned by ordinary folk who had heeded the call and whose vessels could navigate the shallow waters. Emboldened, Churchill delivers his famous We shall fight them on the beaches speech.

1961 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sparks the Berlin Crisis by ending American, British and French access to East Berlin. 1979 Flight-lieutenant Jerry Rawlings seizes power in Ghana.

1988 Three cars on a train carrying hexogen, a chemical more energetic than TNT, explode near Gorky Oblast, in the USSR, killing 91 and injuring about 500.

1989 The Tiananmen Square protests are suppressed in Beijing, at least 241 die. , Unofficial figures place death toll near 1 000. 2019 Deforestation of the Amazon forest in Brazil is at its fastest for a decade as 740km2 cleared in 30 days, according to Brazilian space research institute. | THE HISTORIAN