TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Friday, June 18, the 169th day of 2021. There are 196 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On June 18, 1812, the War of 1812 began as the United States Congress approved, and President James Madison signed, a declaration of war against Britain.
On this date:
■ In 1778, American forces entered Philadelphia as the British withdrew during the Revolutionary War.
■ In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte met defeat at Waterloo as British and Prussian troops defeated the French in Belgium.
■ In 1873, suffragist Susan B. Anthony was found guilty by a judge in Canandaigua, New York, of breaking the law by casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election. (The judge fined Anthony $100, but she never paid the penalty.)
■ In 1940, during World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill urged his countrymen to conduct themselves in a manner that would prompt future generations to say, “This was their finest hour.” Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech on the BBC in which he rallied his countrymen after the fall of France to Nazi Germany.
■ In 1953, a U.S. Air Force Douglas C-124 Globemaster II crashed near Tokyo, killing all 129 people on board. Egypt’s 148-year-old Muhammad Ali Dynasty came to an end with the overthrow of the monarchy and the proclamation of a republic.
■ In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda spoke to each other by telephone as they inaugurated the first trans-Pacific cable completed by AT&T between Japan and Hawaii.
■ In 1979, President Jimmy Carter and Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev signed the SALT II strategic arms limitation treaty in Vienna.
■ In 1983, astronaut Sally K. Ride became America’s first woman in space as she and four colleagues blasted off aboard the space shuttle Challenger on a six-day mission.
■ In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Georgia v. McCollum, ruled that criminal defendants could not use race as a basis for excluding potential jurors from their trials.
■ In 2003, baseball Hall-of-Famer Larry Doby, who broke the American League’s color barrier in 1947, died in Montclair, N.J., at age 79.
■ In 2010, death row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner died in a barrage of bullets as Utah carried out its first firing squad execution in 14 years. (Gardner had been sentenced to death for fatally shooting attorney Michael Burdell during a failed escape attempt from a Salt Lake City courthouse.)
■ In 2018, President Donald Trump announced that he was directing the Pentagon to create the “Space Force” as an independent service branch. Troubled rapper-singer XXXTentacion (ex ex ex ten-ta-see-YAWN’) was shot and killed in Florida in what police called an apparent robbery attempt.
Ten years ago: President Hamid Karzai acknowledged that the U.S. and Afghan governments had held talks with Taliban emissaries in a bid to end the nation’s nearly 10-year war. Yelena Bonner, 88, a Russian rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, died in Boston. Clarence Clemons, the saxophone player for the E Street Band who was one of the key influences in Bruce Springsteen’s life and music, died in Florida at age 69.