25 Years Ago
June 7, 1979 President Jimmy Carter approves the $30 billion MX missile program, in which nuclear weapons will be shuffled around the country on underground rails and pop up when needed. This whack-a-mole concealment scheme will be abandoned two years later.
50 Years Ago
June 17, 1954 A Senate committee concludes its hearings on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s charges of a cover-up of Communist influence in the Army. The hearings have exposed McCarthy’s slipshod investigative methods.
100 Years Ago
June 21, 1904 At the Republican National Convention, in Chicago, Secretary of State John Hay announces that he has sent a telegram to the Moroccan government reading: WE WANT PERDICARIS ALIVE OR RAISULI DEAD . (An American named Ion H. Perdicaris had been kidnapped in Morocco the previous month by an outlaw named Raisuli.) Soon afterward Perdicaris is released unharmed.
250 Years Ago
July 3, 1754 British forces led by George Washington surrender Fort Necessity, which they have occupied for five weeks, to a much larger French contingent. The surrender gives France control of the forks of the Ohio River, the site of present-day Pittsburgh, and is the opening skirmish in what will become a global conflict: the Seven Years’ War.
350 Years Ago
July 8, 1654 Jacob Barsimon, the first Jew to settle in North America, arrives in Manhattan.
400 Years Ago
June 1604 The first French settlement on the North Atlantic coast is established on Neutral Island in the St. Croix River, in what is now Maine. It will later be moved to Nova Scotia.
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