On June 7, 1753, England’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 1776 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed to the Continental Congress a resolution calling for a declaration of independence from Britain.
In 1864 President Abraham Lincoln was nominated for re-election at the Republican Party’s convention.
In 1892 a man of mixed race was arrested when he refused to move from a seat reserved for whites on a train in New Orleans. The case led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark “separate but equal” decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896.
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, who would become singer Tom Jones, was born in Pontypridd, Wales.
In 1948 the 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 — who would go on to become the rock singer, songwriter and musician known as 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 that 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 the crime; a third received life in prison.)
In 2000 U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the breakup of Microsoft Corp. (An appeals court later threw out the breakup order; the Justice Department, under the Bush administration, said it would no longer seek a breakup of Microsoft.)
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, in a national first, New Hampshire Episcopalians elected Rev. V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as their next bishop.
