On June 8, 632, the prophet Muhammad died; he was believed to be in his early 60s.
In 1809 American revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine died in New York; he was 72.
In 1861 Tennessee seceded from the Union.
In 1867 architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wis.
In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt offered to act as a mediator in the Russo-Japanese War.
In 1947 mystery writer Sara Paretsky was born in Ames, Iowa.
In 1953 the Supreme Court ruled that restaurants in the District of Columbia could not refuse to serve blacks.
In 1955 Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist generally acknowledged as the inventor of the World Wide Web, was born in London.
In 1966 a merger was announced between the National and American Football Leagues, to take effect in 1970.
In 1967 Israeli torpedo boats and planes raided the U.S. communications ship Liberty, resulting in the deaths of 34 American seamen during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. (Israel later called the attack a mistake.)
In 1968 James Earl Ray, indicted in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., was arrested in London.
In 1996 China set off a nuclear test blast.
In 1998 actor Charlton Heston was elected president of the NRA.
In 2000 Jeff MacNelly, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and creator of the comic strip “Shoe,” died in Baltimore; he was 52.
