June  20

451 – The forces of Roman General Flavius Aetius and Visigoth King Theodoric engage the Hun army of Attila on the Catalaunian plain in what is now northeastern France. Although the battle is inconclusive, Attila retreats back to Hungary to regroup his forces.

1782 – The U.S. Congress adopts the Great Seal of the United States.

1787 – Oliver Ellsworth makes a motion at the Federal Convention to call the government the ‘United States’.

1819 – The SS Savannah arrives at Liverpool,  completing the first crossing of the Atlantic by a steam powered vessel

1837 – Princess  Alexandrina Victoria of Kent and Strathearn becomes Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on the death of her uncle, King William IV

1840 – Samuel Morse receives a patent for the telegraph.

1863 – The state of West Virginia,  a split off of counties that do not adhere to the Confederacy, is admitted as the 35th state.

1877 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world’s first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario. And away we went until we’ve ended up here today with ‘smart’ cell phones.

1893 – Lizzie Borden is acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother.

1900 –The Imperial Chinese Army, in direct support of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists movement, called the ‘Boxers’,  begins a 55 day siege of the Legation Quarter in Beijing, China.

1942 – During World War II, Kazimierz Piechowski and 3 other prisoners, dressed as German officers, steal a staff car and escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp to carry a report that Polish military intelligence officer Witold Pilecki, who deliberately allowed himself to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, had prepared about the camp for the Allies.

1943 – During World War II, the Royal Air Force launches Operation Bellicose, the first shuttle bombing raid of the war. Avro Lancaster bombers damage the V-2 rocket production facilities at the Zeppelin Works while enroute to an air base in Algeria.

1944 – The Battle of the Philippine Sea concludes with a decisive U.S. naval victory. The naval air battle is known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”.
The experimental German V-2 rocket reaches an altitude of 110 miles, becoming the first man made object to reach outer space.

1945 – The U.S. Secretary of State approves the transfer of Wernher von Braun and his team of Nazi rocket scientists to the U.S.

1956 – Linea Aeropostal Venezolana Flight 253 , a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation, crashes in the Atlantic Ocean off Asbury Park, New Jersey as it tries to return to Idlewild Airport for an engine problem, killing all 74 passengers and crew aboard.

1963 – Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States sign an agreement to establish the so-called “red telephone” link between Washington D.C. and Moscow.

1972 –  An 18½-minute gap  is noticed in the tape recording of the conversations between President Richard Nixon and his advisers.

1975 – The film Jaws is released in the United States

1982 – The International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide opens in Tel Aviv, despite attempts by the Turkish government to cancel it, as it included presentations on the Armenian genocide.

1990 – At the Palomar Observatory in California, astronomers David H. Levy and Henry Holt discover an asteroid sharing the same orbit as Mars, they name 5261 Eureka.

1991 – After German Unity, the German Bundestag votes to move the seat of government from the former West German capital of Bonn back to the original capital of Berlin.

2003 – The Wikimedia Foundation is founded in St. Petersburg, Florida.

2019 – Iran’s Air Defense Forces shoot down an American surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz .