On June 11, 1509, England’s King Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon. (She was the first of his six wives and the mother of Queen Mary I.)
In 1770 English explorer James Cook became the first European to discover Australia’s Great Barrier Reef when he ran his ship onto it.
In 1776 the Continental Congress formed a committee to draft a declaration of independence from Britain. (Its members were Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman.)
In 1864 Romantic composer and conductor Richard Strauss was born in Munich, Germany.
In 1913 Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi was born in Brooklyn, N.Y.
In 1919 Sir Barton won the Belmont Stakes, becoming horse racing’s first Triple Crown winner.
In 1942 the U.S. signed a lend-lease agreement with Moscow to aid the Soviet war effort in World War II.
In 1963 Alabama Gov. George Wallace confronted federal troops at the University of Alabama in an effort to defy a federal court order to allow two blacks to enroll at the school.
In 1970 the U.S. presence in Libya ended as the last detachment left Wheelus Air Base.
In 1978 Joseph Freeman Jr. became the first black priest ordained in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In 1979 actor John Wayne died in Los Angeles; he was 72.
In 1985 Karen Ann Quinlan, 31, in a coma since April 15, 1975, died in a Morris Plains, N.J., nursing home nine years after being removed from a respirator under a court order obtained by her parents.
In 1987 Margaret Thatcher became the first British prime minister in 160 years to win a third consecutive term.
In 1990 the Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting desecration of the American flag.
In 1992 the Supreme Court ruled that people who commit hate crimes may be sentenced to extra punishment.
In 1994 the U.S., South Korea and Japan agreed to seek punitive steps against North Korea over its nuclear program.
In 2001 Timothy McVeigh, 33, convicted of murder in the deaths of 168 people in the April 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, was executed by injection in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind.
In 2003 television news pioneer David Brinkley died in Houston; he was 82.
In 2004 the nation bade goodbye to former President Ronald Reagan at a Washington funeral, followed hours later by a hilltop burial ceremony in California.
In 2005 the world’s richest countries agreed in London to write off more than $40 billion of debt owed by the poorest nations.
