June 22 – Some important events on this day.
168 BC 👉🏼 Battle of Pydna: Romans under Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeat and capture Macedonian King Perseus, ending the Third Macedonian War.
1535 👉🏼 Cardinal John Fisher is beheaded on Tower Hill, London, for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.
1559 👉🏼 Jewish quarter of Prague burned and looted.
1611 👉🏼 Henry Hudson set adrift in Hudson Bay by mutineers on his ship Discovery and never seen again. ✔️READ THE ARTICLE!
1633 👉🏼 Galileo Galilei forced to recant his Copernican views that the Earth orbits the Sun by the Pope (Vatican only admits it was wrong on Oct 31, 1992!)
1675 👉🏼 Royal Greenwich Observatory established in England by Charles II
1772 👉🏼 Somerset v Stewart court case finds slavery unsupported by English common law, encouraging the abolitionist movement
1812 👉🏼 Upon learning of plans by the Americans to execute a surprise attack, Laura Secord walks 32 km to warn British troops, results in a British surprise victory at the Battle of Beaver Dams.
1847 👉🏼 First ring doughnut supposedly created by Hanson Gregory
1848 👉🏼 Beginning of the June Days uprising in Paris by French workers
1865 👉🏼 The CSS Shenandoah fires the last shot of the American Civil War in the Bering Strait to indicate surrender
1934 👉🏼 John Dillinger is informally named America’s first Public Enemy Number One
1941 👉🏼 Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany and its allies invade the Soviet Union during WWII.
On this day, Nazi Germany and its allies launched the largest invasion in military history when they attacked the Soviet Union across a 2,900km front line with more than 3 million troops. Operation Barbarossa was a decisive moment in World War II, as up until the attack on Russia, Germany had dominated the European continent with a series of successful military occupations and alliances.
After an initial series of successful gains, the Axis advance halted after the failed attempt to capture Moscow at the end of 1941, by which time the infamous Russian winter had begun to set in. This allowed the Russians to launch counteroffensives, and the Germans were never again able to seize the offensive and were instead forced into a war of attrition. The failure of the invasion sealed Germany’s fate and awoke the sleeping Russian beast which swept westward and into Berlin by 1945.
The war in the Soviet Union was the most disastrous theater of war in human history. It carried with it gigantic human costs – 26 million civilian deaths in Russia alone – as well as the beginning of the mass extermination of Jews in the Holocaust. More people died fighting in the East than in any other theater of World War II.
1963 👉🏼 Stevie Wonder aged 13 releases his first single “Fingertips” (first live non-studio recording to go to No. 1 on Billboard) 🎧
1977 👉🏼 Walt Disney’s “Rescuers” released, first Disney film to get a sequel 🎥