A huge section of the city of Constantinople, Turkey, is set ablaze on June 5, 1870. When the smoke finally cleared, 9,000 homes were destroyed and 2,000 people were dead. A young girl was carrying a hot piece of charcoal to her family’s kitchen in an iron pan when she tripped, sending the charcoal out […]

On June 5, 1888, President Grover Cleveland vetoes a bill that would have given a pension to war widow Johanna Loewinger, whose husband died 14 years after being discharged from the army. Mr. Loewinger served in the Civil War, enlisting on June 28, 1861. He was discharged a little less than a year later for […]

In one of the most significant speeches of the Cold War, Secretary of State George C. Marshall calls on the United States to assist in the economic recovery of postwar Europe. His speech provided the impetus for the so-called Marshall Plan, under which the United States sent billions of dollars to Western Europe to rebuild […]

On June 5, 1956, in an appearance on “The Milton Berle Show,” Elvis Presley he set his guitar aside and put every part of his being into a blistering, scandalous performance of “Hound Dog.” By the end of 1955, Elvis Presley had nearly 18 months of nonstop touring behind him and two dozen singles already […]

Israel responds to a build-up of Arab forces along its borders by launching a preemptive aerial attack against Egypt. Jordan subsequently entered the fray, but the Arab coalition was no match for Israel’s armed forces. In six days of fighting, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, the Golan Heights of Syria […]

On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describing five cases of a rare lung infection, PCP, in young, otherwise healthy gay men in Los Angeles. It was unknown at the time, but the article is describing the effects of AIDS. Today, […]

On June 5, 2004, Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, dies after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Reagan, who was also a well-known actor and served as governor of California, was a popular president known for restoring American confidence after the problems of the 1970s. Born on February 6, 1911, […]

On June 5, 2013, Americans learned that their government was spying broadly on its own people. That’s when The Guardian, and later The Washington Post, published the first of a series of reports put together from documents leaked by an anonymous source. The material exposed a government-run surveillance program that monitored the communications records of […]