June 5

1837 – The city of Houston is incorporated by the Republic of Texas.

1850 – Pat Garrett is born in Chambers County, Alabama

1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starts a 10 month run in the National Era newspaper.

1864 – Union forces under General David Hunter defeat a Confederate army at Piedmont, Virginia, taking nearly 1,000 prisoners.

1893 – The trial of Lizzie Borden for the murder of her father and step-mother begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

1916 – Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the first American Jew to hold such a position.

1917 –Under the Selective Service Act of 1917, conscription begins in the United States as “Army registration day”.

1944 – More than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000 tons of bombs on German gun batteries on the Normandy coast in preparation for D-Day.

1945 – The Allied Control Council, the military occupation governing body of Germany, formally takes power.

1946 – A fire in the La Salle Hotel in Chicago kills 61 people.

1947 – In a speech at Harvard University, Secretary of State George Marshall calls for economic aid to post war Europe, called the ‘Marshall Plan’.

1967 – The Six Day War begins as Israel launches surprise strikes against Egyptian airfields in response to the mobilization of Egyptian forces on the Israeli border.

1968 – Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, California.

1976 – The earthen dam on the Teton river in Idaho collapses, killing 11 people in the small towns downstream as a result of the flooding.

1981 – A report by the Centers for Disease Control includes 5 people in Los Angeles, California, having a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, the first recognized cases of AIDS.

1998 – A strike that ends up lasting 7 weeks begins at the General Motors parts factory in Flint, Michigan.

2001 – Tropical Storm Allison makes landfall on the Texas coastline and dumps large amounts of rain over Houston, causing $5.5 billion in damage, the second costliest tropical storm in U.S. history.

2004 – Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States dies at his home in Los Angeles

2017 – Montenegro becomes the 29th member of NATO.