Today in history

On June 1, 1968, the cult British television series “The Prisoner,” starring Patrick McGoohan as an ex-secret agent who finds himself trapped in a sinister, Orwellian village, had its American premiere on CBS. Author-lecturer Helen Keller, who earned a college degree despite being blind and deaf almost her entire life, died in Westport, Connecticut, at age 87.

In 1533, Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII, was crowned as Queen Consort of England.

In 1813, the mortally wounded commander of the USS Chesapeake, Capt. James Lawrence, gave the order, “Don’t give up the ship” during a losing battle with the British frigate HMS Shannon in the War of 1812.

In 1927, Lizzie Borden, accused but acquitted of the 1892 ax murders of her father, Andrew, and her stepmother, Abby, died in Fall River, Massachusetts, at age 66.

In 1977, the Soviet Union formally charged Jewish human rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky with treason. (Shcharansky was imprisoned, then released in 1986; he’s now known as Natan Sharansky.)

In 1980, Cable News Network made its debut. In 2009, Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of everyone on board.

Ten years ago: Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton won a lopsided, but largely symbolic, victory in Puerto Rico’s presidential primary. Fire ripped through a back lot at Universal Studios. NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander took its first practice scoop of Martian soil.

Five years ago: In a scene reminiscent of the Arab Spring, thousands of people flooded Istanbul’s main square after a crackdown on an anti-government protest turned city streets into a battlefield clouded by tear gas.

One year ago: President Donald Trump declared he was pulling the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate agreement. Ananya Vinay, a 12-year-old from Fresno, California, won the 90th Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling “marocain,” a type of dress fabric of ribbed crepe.