On June 7, 1692, a massive earthquake devastates the town of Port Royal in Jamaica, killing thousands. The strong tremors, soil liquefaction and a tsunami brought on by the earthquake combined to destroy the entire town. Port Royal was built on a peninsula off the coast of Jamaica in the harbor across from present-day Kingston. […]

Thirteen years after American settlers founded the city named for him, Chief Seattle dies in a nearby village of his people. Born sometime around 1790, Seattle (Seathl) was a chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes who lived around the Pacific Coast bay that is today called Puget Sound. He was the son of a […]

On June 7, 1937, Hollywood is shocked to learn of the sudden and tragic death of the actress Jean Harlow, who succumbs to uremic poisoning (now better known as acute renal failure, or acute kidney failure) at the age of 26. Born Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri, she moved with her mother to Los […]

King George VI becomes the first reigning British monarch to visit the United States when he and his wife, Elizabeth, cross the Canadian-U.S. border to Niagara Falls, New York. The royal couple subsequently visited New York City and Washington, D.C., where they called for a greater U.S. role in resolving the crisis in Europe. On […]

On June 7, 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a Connecticut law banning contraception in the case Griswold vs. Connecticut. This landmark ruling regarding the right to privacy is cited in future significant cases, including Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973. The court case began in 1961, when […]

On June 7, 1968, two days after an assassin’s bullet felled Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Fred Rogers, soft-spoken host of the children’s public television show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” dedicates an episode to explaining the national tragedy to his young, largely pre-school audience. Kennedy’s shocking murder, at a California campaign event, came just two […]

The article that inspired the blockbuster movie Saturday Night Fever—”The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” by journalist Nik Cohn—was published on this day in 1976 in the June 7 issue of New York magazine. Disco as a musical style predated the movie Saturday Night Fever by perhaps as many as five years, but […]

On June 7, 2002, 41-year-old Michael Skakel is convicted in the 1975 murder of his former Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbor, 15-year-old Martha Moxley. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, was later sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. On October 30, 1975, Moxley was bludgeoned to […]