The most successful and feared Confederate commerce raider of the war, the CSS Alabama, sinks after a spectacular battle off the coast of France with the USS Kearsarge.

Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, installed as emperor of Mexico by French Emperor Napoleon III in 1864, is executed on the orders of Benito Juarez, the president of the Mexican Republic.

On June 19, 1892, Francesca Rojas’ two young children—a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl—are stabbed to death in their home in the small town of Necochea, Argentina. Rojas tells police that a man named Velasquez had threatened her when she rejected his sexual advances earlier in the day. Upon returning home later, Rojas claimed to have seen Velasquez escaping out her open door. The case would become the first to be solved by fingerprint identification.

On June 19, 1905, some 450 people attend the opening day of the world’s first notable nickelodeon, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and developed by the brilliant Vaudeville impresario and showman Harry Davis. While it wasn't technically the nation's first theater for moving pictures, its runaway success made it, in many historians' view, the birthplace of the movie theater as a place for mass entertainment.

On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets, are executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. Both refused to admit any wrongdoing and proclaimed their innocence right up to the time of their deaths, by the electric chair. The Rosenbergs were the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed for espionage during peacetime and their case remains controversial to this day.

On June 19, 1971, Carole King 10 years after her professional songwriting-for-hire career took off, Carole King finally fulfilled her long-held dream of having her own hit record as both singer and songwriter when she earned her first number-one single as a performer with the double-sided hit “It’s Too Late/I Feel The Earth Move.”

Chinese American Vincent Chin, 27, is beaten in the head with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers in Detroit on June 19, 1982. Chin died in a hospital four days later, on June 23.

On June 19, 2006, on the remote island of Spitsbergen halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland lay the ceremonial first stone of the Global Seed Vault. The vault, which now has the capacity to hold 2.25 billion seeds, is intended to “provide insurance against both incremental and catastrophic loss of crop diversity.”

When the clock struck midnight on June 19, 2014, King Juan Carlos I of Spain’s nearly 40-year reign came to an end. Two weeks after abdicating the Spanish throne amidst sagging approval ratings, Juan Carlos symbolically removed his red sash—signifying his status as leader of the Spanish military—and wrapped it around the waist of his son, 46-year-old Crown Prince Felipe.