On this date...

Map of the Battle of Bunker Hill

In 1775, In the Battle of Bunker Hill, American colonial revolutionaries clashed with British regulars during the Siege of Boston. British General Thomas Gage lands his troops on the Charlestown Peninsula overlooking Boston, Massachusetts, and leads them against Breed’s Hill, a fortified American position just below Bunker Hill, on June 17, 1775. Breeds Hill is where the battle actually took place.

In 1856, The Republican Party opened its first convention, in Philadelphia.

In 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne Native Americans score a tactical victory over General Crook’s forces at the Battle of the Rosebud, foreshadowing the disaster of the Battle of the Little Big Horn eight days later.

In 1885, The Statute of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor.

In 1900, and continuing for nearly a month, future President Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou are caught in the middle of the Boxer Rebellion in China, when the community of foreigners they lived in, in the city of Tianjin, is besieged and under attack.

In 1928, Amelia Earhart embarked on the first trans-Atlantic flight by a woman.*

In 1930, The United States imposed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff, raising the average tariff by some 20 percent and worsening an already beleaguered world economy.

In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, phones then Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman and politely asks him not to make inquiries about a defense plant in Pasco, Washington.

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Abington (Pa.) School District v. Schempp, struck down, 8-1, rules requiring the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer or reading of biblical verses in public schools.

In 1972, The Watergate, an office-apartment-hotel complex in Washington, D.C., which headquartered the Democratic National Committee, was broken into by five men who were later arrested, prompting the Watergate scandal that upended the administration of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.

In 1994, American gridiron football hero O.J. Simpson was charged with the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, though after a sensational trial he was acquitted the following year.

In 2008, hundreds of same-sex couples got married across California on the first full day that same-sex marriage became legal by order of the state’s highest court; an estimated 11,000 same-sex couples would be married under the California law in its first three months.

In 2015, nine Black worshippers were killed when a gunman opened fire during a bible study gathering at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. (Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, was captured the following day; he would be convicted on state and federal murder and hate crime charges and sentenced to death.)

In 2021, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, left intact the entire Affordable Care Act, rejecting a major Republican-led effort to kill the national health care law known informally as “Obamacare.”

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, creating the first new national holiday since the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

*At least two publications said today was the date when Amelia Earhart embarked on this flight - other publications say June 18th.