On June 7, 1753, Britain’s King George II gave his assent to an act of Parliament establishing the British Museum.
In 1769 frontiersman Daniel Boone began his exploration of present-day Kentucky.
In 1778 George Bryan Brummell, the man of fashion known as “Beau Brummell,” was born in London.
In 1848 post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin was born in Paris.
In 1864 President Abraham Lincoln was nominated for re-election at the Republican Party’s convention in Baltimore.
In 1868 architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow, Scotland.
In 1892 mixed-race train rider was arrested when he refused to move from a seat reserved for whites en route to New Orleans. The case led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark “separate but equal” decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896.
In 1909 actress Jessica Tandy was born in London.
In 1917 poet Gwendolyn Brooks, later a Chicago literary institution, was born in Topeka, Kan.
In 1929 the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence.
In 1939 King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, arrived in Niagara Falls, N.Y., from Canada on the first visit to the U.S. by a reigning British monarch.
In 1940 Thomas Woodward, later known as singer Tom Jones, was born in Pontypridd, Wales.
In 1943 poet Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tenn.
In 1948 communists completed their takeover of Czechoslovakia with the resignation of President Eduard Benes, who had refused to sign a communist-dictated constitution.
In 1958 Prince Rogers Nelson–later known as rock singer and songwriter Prince, among other names–was born in Minneapolis.
In 1972 the musical “Grease” opened on Broadway.
In 1981 Israeli planes destroyed an Iraqi nuclear power reactor that Israel said could have been used to make nuclear weapons.
In 1996 the Clinton White House acknowledged it had obtained the FBI files of prominent Republicans, calling it “an innocent bureaucratic mistake.”
In 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 later were sentenced to death for his murder; a third received life in prison.)
In 1999 Indonesia held its most open and fair legislative elections in 44 years; the opposition led by Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the late President Sukarno, won, but failed to get a majority in parliament.
In 2002 Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel was convicted in Norwalk, Conn., of beating Greenwich neighbor Martha Moxley to death when they were 15 in 1975.
In 2003 New Hampshire Episcopalians elected gay priest V. Gene Robinson as their next bishop.
