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 for a declaration of independence from Britain.
In 1848 post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin was born in Paris.
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 1917 poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who would become a Chicago literary institution, was born in Topeka, Kan.
In 1929 the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.
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 1948 the communists completed their takeover of Czechoslovakia with the resignation of President Eduard Benes.
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 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 2003, in a national first, New Hampshire Episcopalians elected Rev. V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as their next bishop.
In 2005 General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner announced plans to close plants and eliminate 25,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States by 2008.
