A Focus on History: June 23-29

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June 23

U.S. president Richard Nixon signs into law the Higher Education Act, which includes the groundbreaking Title IX legislation. Title IX barred discrimination in higher education programs, including funds for sports, and other extracurricular activities. As a result, women’s participation in team sports, particularly in collegiate athletics, surged with the passage of this act. – 1972.

Mafia boss John Gotti, who was nicknamed the “Teflon Don” after escaping unscathed from several trials during the 1980s, is sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty on 14 accounts of conspiracy to commit murder and racketeering. – 1992.

June 24

U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, N.M., almost exactly 50 years earlier. – 1997.

June 25

Native American forces, led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a bloody battle near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River. – 1876.

Fair Labor Standards Act passes Congress which bans child labor and sets the 40-hour work week. – 1938.

Armed forces from communist North Korea smash into South Korea, to set off the Korean War. The United States, acting under the auspices of the United Nations, quickly springs to the defense of South Korea and fight a bloody and frustrating war for the next three years. – 1950.

June 26

During World War I, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops land in France at the port of Saint Nazaire. The landing site had been kept secret because of the menace of German submarines, but by the time the Americans had lined up to take their first salute on French soil, an enthusiastic crowd had gathered to welcome them. – 1917.

U.S. and British pilots begin delivering food and supplies by airplane to Berlin after the city is isolated by a Soviet Union blockade. – 1948.

The U.S. Congress approves the Federal Highway Act, which allocates more than $30 billion for the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highways; it was the largest public construction project in U.S. history to that date. – 1956.

June 27

The Germans set up two-way radio communication in a newly-occupied French territory and employ their most sophisticated coding machine, Enigma. – 1940.

U.S. president Harry S Truman announces that he is ordering U.S. air and naval forces to South Korea to aid the democratic nation in repulsing an invasion by communist North Korea. – 1950.

June 28

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August. June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s death, Germany and the Allied Powers sign the Treaty of Versailles, to officially mark the end of World War I. There were more than 16 million deaths and 20 million wounded during the Great War. – 1914.

June 29

In Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules by a vote of 5-4 that capital punishment, as it is employed on the state and federal level, is unconstitutional. The majority held that, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the death penalty qualified as “cruel and unusual punishment.” – 1972.

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