Poet Dante Alighieri becomes one of six priors of Florence, active in governing the city. Dante’s political activities, which include the banishment of several rivals, lead to his own exile from Florence, his native city, after 1302. He will write his great work, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family […]

On June 15, 1776, the Assembly of the Lower Counties of Pennsylvania declares itself independent of British and Pennsylvanian authority, thereby creating the state of Delaware. Delaware did not exist as a colony under British rule. As of 1704, Pennsylvania had two colonial assemblies: one for the “Upper Counties,” originally Bucks, Chester and Philadelphia, and […]

On June 15, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issues a proclamation in which he calls for the mustering of new militia in the Mid-Atlantic states of Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio—in part to help protect Washington, D.C., America’s capital city. Throughout June, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was on the move. […]

During the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia collide for the last time as the first wave of Union troops attacks Petersburg, a vital Southern rail center 23 miles south of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. The two massive armies would not become […]

Robert Falcon Scott’s ship, the Terra Nova, sets sail from Cardiff, Wales on June 15, 1910, bound for Antarctica. Though it will succeed in reaching its objective, the expedition will end in tragedy as Scott and his companions give up their lives in order to become the second party to reach the South Pole. Scott […]

On June 15, 1943, Paul Blobel, an SS colonel, is given the assignment of coordinating the destruction of the evidence of the grossest of Nazi atrocities, the systematic extermination of European Jews. As the summer of 1943 approached, Allied forces had begun making cracks in Axis strongholds, in the Pacific and in the Mediterranean specifically. […]

On June 15, 1944, American aircraft bomb German-occupied Budapest—with leaflets threatening “punishment” for those responsible for the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The U.S. government wanted the SS and Hitler to know it was watching, to deter further deportations. Admiral Miklas Horthy, regent and virtual dictator of Hungary, vehemently anticommunist […]

On June 15, 1974,  Simon & Schuster releases All the President’s Men, the first definitive book about the Watergate scandal, authored by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters from The Washington Post who broke the explosive story. Two months later, President Richard Nixon resigns from office in disgrace. In the […]

On June 15, 2012, 33-year-old aerialist Nik Wallenda becomes the first person to walk across high wire stretched over Niagara Falls, which lie on the border between New York state and Ontario, Canada. More than 100,000 people gather at the falls and 10 million viewers watch on television. Wallenda started around 10:15 p.m. from the […]