ON JUNE 13 ...

On June 13, 1886, King Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned in Lake Starnberg.

In 1888 Congress created the Department of Labor.

In 1900 China’s Boxer Rebellion targeting foreigners, as well as Chinese Christians, erupted into full-scale violence.

In 1927 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York.

In 1944 Germany began launching flying-bomb attacks against Britain during World War II.

In 1966 the Supreme Court issued its landmark Miranda decision, ruling that criminal suspects had to be informed of their constitutional rights prior to questioning by police.

In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson nominated Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1971 The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of

America’s involvement in Vietnam.

In 1977 James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was recaptured following his escape three days earlier from a Tennessee prison.

In 1983 the U.S. space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, became the first spacecraft to leave the solar system as it crossed the orbit of the system’s outermost planet.

In 1986 bandleader Benny Goodman, the clarinet-playing “King of Swing,” died in New York; he was 77.

In 1998 cartoonist Reg Smythe, the creator of “Andy Capp,” died in Hartlepool, England; he was 80.

In 2000 the presidents of South Korea and North Korea opened a summit in the northern capital of Pyongyang with pledges to seek reunification of the divided peninsula. Also in 2000 Italy pardoned Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who had tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981.

In 2004, in Iraq, gunmen assassinated a senior Education

Ministry official. Also in 2004 former President George H.W. Bush celebrated his 80th birthday with a 13,000-foot parachute jump over his presidential library in College Station, Texas.

In 2005 a jury in Santa Maria, Calif., acquitted Michael Jackson of molesting a 13-year-old cancer survivor at his Neverland ranch. Also in 2005 the Supreme Court warned prosecutors to use care in striking minorities from juries, siding with black murder suspects in Texas and California who contended their juries had been unfairly stacked with whites. Also in 2005 the Senate apologized for blocking anti-lynching legislation in the early 20th century, when mob violence against blacks was commonplace.

In 2013 the Supreme Court rejected patents for human genes in a 9-0 ruling. Also in 2013 the Black Forest wildfire near Colorado Springs, Colo., killed two people and destroyed more than 500 homes, making it the most destructive fire in the state’s history. Also in 2013 an explosion at a petrochemical plant killed two people and injured more than 100 in Geismar, La. Also in 2013 Nicaragua’s National Assemply approved a Chinese company’s project to build a $40 billion shipping canal across the Central American nation to compete with the Panama Canal.

In 2014 Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko vowed to punish pro-Russian rebels after a military transport plane was shot down and exploded near the industrial city of Luhansk, killing all 49 aboard.

In 2017 A.R. Gurney, a playwright who portrayed the fading culture of the Eastern WASP aristocracy in such mordantly comic plays as “The Cocktail Hour” and “Love Letters” and became one of the most widely produced dramatists of his generation, died; he was 86.