In 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution to the Continental Congress stating “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

In 1769, frontiersman Daniel Boone first began to explore present day Kentucky.

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a “Creole of color,” was fined for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, the U. S. Supreme Court upheld “ separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.)

In 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.

In 1939, King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, arrived at Niagara Falls, New York, from Canada on the first visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch.

In 1942, the World War II Battle of Midway ended in a decisive victory for American forces over the Imperial Japanese.

In 1965, the U. S. Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, recognized a constitutional right to privacy as it struck down, 7-2, a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven for providing contraceptives to married couples.