On This Day (June 9)

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• 68 – Roman Emperor Nero (pictured) committed suicide after he was deposed by the Senate.
  
  
  
  
• 1310 – Italian artist Duccio's Maestà with Twenty Angels and Nineteen Saints, a seminal artwork of the early Italian Renaissance, was unveiled and installed in Siena Cathedral in Siena, Italy.
• 1650 - The Harvard Corporation, the more powerful of the two administrative boards of Harvard, is established. It was the first legal corporation in the Americas.
• 1672 - Tsar Peter I of Russia born. (d. 1725) (Peter I ruled the Russian Empire from 7 May [O.S. 27 April] 1682 until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his weak and sickly half-brother, Ivan V. Peter carried out a policy of Westernization and expansion that transformed the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire, a major European power.)
  
  
  Peter the Great of Russia
  
  
• 1772 – In an act of defiance against the Navigation Acts, American patriots led by Abraham Whipple attacked and burned the British schooner HMS Gaspée.
• 1856 – Mormon pioneers began leaving Iowa City, Iowa and headed west for Salt Lake City, Utah, carrying all their possessions in two-wheeled handcarts.
• 1891 - Cole Porter, American composer and lyricist born. (d. 1964) (Porter was an American composer and songwriter from Peru, Indiana. His works include the musical comedies Kiss Me, Kate (1948) (based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew), Fifty Million Frenchmen, and Anything Goes, as well as songs like "Night and Day", "I Get a Kick out of You", and "I've Got You Under My Skin". He was noted for his sophisticated (sometimes ribald) lyrics, clever rhymes, and complex forms.)
• 1909 - Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, became the first woman to drive across the United States. With three female companions, none of whom could drive a car, for fifty-nine days she drove a Maxwell automobile the 3,800 miles from Manhattan, New York, to San Francisco, California.
• 1928 – Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith and his crew landed their Southern Cross aircraft in Brisbane, completing the first ever trans-Pacific flight from the United States mainland to Australia.
• 1934 - Donald Duck debuts in The Wise Little Hen.

On This Day (June 8)

• 1625 - Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Italian scientist born. (d. 1712) (Cassini was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, engineer, and astrologer. Cassini, also known as Giandomenico Cassini, was born in Perinaldo, near Sanremo, at that time in the Republic of Genoa.)
• 1671 - Tomaso Albinoni, Italian composer born. (d. 1751) (Albinoni was a Venetian Baroque composer. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is mainly remembered today for his instrumental music, some of which is regularly recorded. The "Adagio in G minor" attributed to him (actually a later reconstruction) is one of the most frequently recorded pieces of Baroque music.)
  
  
  Herbert von Karajan conducts the Berlin Philharmonic
  
  
• 1783 – Iceland's Laki craters (pictured) began an eight-month eruption, triggering major famine and massive fluorine poisoning.
• 1789 - James Madison introduces a proposed Bill of Rights in the U.S. House of Representatives.
• 1887 – German-American statistician Herman Hollerith received a patent for his punch card calculator.
• 1916 - Francis Crick, English molecular biologist; Nobel laureate born. (d. 2004) (Crick was an English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953.)
• 1949 – Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian political novel by English writer George Orwell about life in the fictional totalitarian government of Oceania, was first published.
• 1950 – Thomas Blamey became Australia's first and currently only Field Marshal.
• 1995 – Danish-Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf released the first public version of the scripting language PHP for producing dynamic web pages.
• 2004 – Ethiopian distance runner Kenenisa Bekele broke the world record for outdoor 10,000 m in Ostrava, Czech Republic.

On This Day (June 7)

• 1099 – Members of the First Crusade reached Jerusalem and began a five-week siege of the city against the Fatimids.
• 1329 - Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland died. (b. 1274) (Robert the Bruce was King of the Scots from 1306 until his death in 1329.)
• 1494 – Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the newly discovered lands of the Americas and Africa between the two countries.
• 1776 – Virginia statesman Richard Henry Lee presented the Lee Resolution to the Second Continental Congress, declaring the Thirteen Colonies to be independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
• 1896 - Robert S. Mulliken, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate born. (d. 1986) (Mulliken was an American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules.)
• 1906 - Cunard Line's RMS Lusitania is launched at the John Brown Shipyard, Glasgow(Clydebank), Scotland.
• 1948 – Rather than sign the Ninth-of-May Constitution making his nation a Communist state, Edvard Beneš chose to resign as President of Czechoslovakia.
• 1954 - Alan Turing, British mathematician and computer scientist died. (b. 1912) (Turing was an English mathematician, logician and cryptographer. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think.)
• 1975 - Sony introduces the Betamax videocassette recorder for sale to the public.
• 1977 - 500 million people watch on television as the high day of Jubilee gets underway for Queen Elizabeth II.
• 1981 – The Israeli Air Force attacked and disabled the Osirak nuclear reactor, assuming it was producing plutonium to further an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

Picture of the Day



A male Leopard Lacewing (Cethosia cyane), a species of heliconiine butterfly found in South Asia.