Events, Births and Deaths Happening on this Date

1654

Louis XIV was crowned King of France in Rheims.

1776

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed to the Continental Congress a resolution calling for a Declaration of Independence.

1864

Abraham Lincoln was nominated for a second term as president at the Republican Party convention in Baltimore.

1892

A man of mixed race named Plessy was arrested when he refused to move from a seat reserved for whites on an East Louisiana Railway train in New Orleans. His case led to the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, in which the ju

1929

The sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.

1939

King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, arrived at Niagara Falls, N.Y., from Canada on the first visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch.

1948

The Communists completed their takeover of Czechoslovakia with the resignation of President Eduard Benes.

1955

U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first President to appear on a color TV broadcast.

1965

U.S. Supreme Court delivered the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, declaring that married couples have the right to use birth control pills.

1981

Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons

1982

Graceland -the Memphis home of Elvis Presley- opened up to the public for the first time.

1993

Woody Allen lost his bitter custody battle against Mia Farrow.

1996

The Clinton White House acknowledged it had obtained the FBI files of prominent Republican, calling it ''an innocent bureaucratic mistake.''

1998

James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were sentenced to death for the crime, a third to life in prison.)

2000

U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the breakup of Microsoft Corp., declaring the software giant should be split into two because it had ''proved untrustworthy in the past.''

2002

President George W. Bush announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

2021

The wife and son of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh were found dead from gunshot wounds. In a case that received national attention, Murdaugh would later be found guilty of murder.

1848

French postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin was born in Paris.

1917

Legendary singer Dean Martin was born as Dino Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio.

1967

Author-critic Dorothy Parker, famed for her caustic wit, died in New York.