June 16 – Some important events on this day.
1784 👉🏼 Holland forbids the wearing of orange clothes 🥻
1794 👉🏼 1st stone laid at biggest Dutch grain windmill De Walvisch in Schiedam 🇳🇱
1858 👉🏼 Abraham Lincoln says “A house divided against itself cannot stand” accepting Illinois Republican Party’s nomination for the Senate
1880 👉🏼 Salvation Army forms in London
1884 👉🏼 1st roller coaster opens.
On this day, the first roller coaster opens at Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York. Known as a switchback railway, it was the brainchild of LaMarcus Thompson, traveled approximately six miles per hour and cost a nickel to ride. The new entertainment was an instant success and by the turn of the century there were hundreds of roller coasters around the country.
1902 👉🏼 “The Wizard of Oz” musical first opens in Chicago, Illinois
1903 👉🏼 Pepsi Cola company forms 🥤
1903 👉🏼 Roald Amundsen commences the first east-west navigation of the Northwest Passage by leaving Oslo, Norway.
He led the Norwegian Antarctic expedition of 1910–12 which was the first to reach the South Pole, famously beating Robert Scott’s expedition by 33-34 days.
Amundsen is recognized as the first person to have reached both poles. He is also known as having the first expedition to traverse the Artic’s Northwest Passage (1903–06).
In 1926, Amundsen and 15 other men also made the first crossing of the Arctic by air, in the airship Norge.
In June 1928, while taking part in a rescue mission for the Airship Italia, the plane he was in disappeared and he is presumed to have died in the crash or shortly afterwards.
1904 👉🏼 Bloomsday (date of events in James Joyce’s Ulysses)
1907 👉🏼 Tsar Nicolas II of Russia dissolves the Second Duma (parliament) and issues an edict that will increase representation of propertied classes while reducing that of peasants, workers and national minorities 🇷🇺
1935 👉🏼 US Congress accepts FDR’s “New Deal”
1944 👉🏼 George Stinney, a 14-year-old African-American boy, is wrongfully executed for the murder of two white girls, becoming the youngest person ever executed in 20th-century America.
On March 23, 1944, in South Carolina, two white girls, 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames, were found dead. They had failed to return home the night before.
Police arrested George Stinney, then 14, and his older brother Johnny, for the murders. Johnny was released but George was held and charged for the murders. His trial, by an all-white jury, lasted one day, and he was found guilty. He had not been allowed to see his family before the trial and he was questioned alone without an attorney. During the trial Stinney’s defense offered no cross-examination, did not call witnesses and offered virtually no defense. The jury deliberated for ten minutes before he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Stinney was executed shortly after, on this day. He was so small compared to adult prisoners that prison staff had difficulty securing him to the electrodes. Only 83 days had passed between his arrest and his death, and he became the youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed.
In 2004 the case was re-opened, and in 2014 the conviction against Stinney was vacated as it was determined by the court that he had not received a fair trial.
1944 👉🏼 Iceland adopts constitution 🇮🇸
1960 👉🏼 “Psycho”, psychological horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, and Vera Miles, opens in New York City 🎥
1965 👉🏼 Bob Dylan records “Like A Rolling Stone” 🎵
1988 👉🏼 In Santa Barbara, CA, a team of 32 divers begin cycling underwater on a standard tricycle, to complete 116.66 mi in 75 hrs 20 mins
2000 👉🏼 Israel complies with UN Security Council Resolution 425 after 22 years, which calls on Israel to completely withdraw from Lebanon. Israel withdraws from all of Lebanon, except the disputed Sheba Farms.