On this day in history

1098: The First Crusade captures the strategically important city of Antioch after an eight month siege.

1940: The last ship of 'Operation Dynamo' leaves Dunkirk, completing the evacuation of 338,226 Allied troops.

1989: Chinese troops open fire on pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds.

Here is a few more things, thanks to the NY times:

1621 The Dutch West India Company received a charter for New Netherlands, present-day New York City.

1808 Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, was born in Christian County, Ky.

1888 The poem "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer was first published, in the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

1937 The Duke of Windsor married American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson, for whom he had abdicated the British throne.

1963 Pope John XXIII died at age 81.

1968 Pop artist Andy Warhol was shot and critically wounded in his New York film studio, The Factory, by actress Valerie Solanas.

1981 Pope John Paul II left a Rome hospital and returned to the Vatican three weeks after an attempt on his life.

1983 Gordon Kahl, a militant tax protester wanted in the slayings of two U.S. marshals in North Dakota, was killed in a gun battle with law enforcement officials near Smithville, Ark.

1989 Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died.

1999 Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic accepted a peace plan for Kosovo designed to end mass expulsions of ethnic Albanians and 11 weeks of NATO airstrikes.

2001 Mel Brooks' musical comedy "The Producers" won a record 12 Tony Awards.

2008 Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, making him the first black candidate to lead his party.


And a couple of notable birthdays:

Anderson Cooper - Journalist

Allen Ginsberg - Beat Poet

Rafael Nadal - Tennis Player

1832: The Great Reform Act redistributes parliamentary seats, giving due weight to Britain's industrial cities.

1913: Suffragette Emily Davison dies after throwing herself in front of the king's horse at the Epsom Derby.

1944: The US Fifth Army reaches central Rome, making it the first Axis capital to fall. A formal procession takes place the next day

1916: A British-backed Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire is proclaimed with an attack on Medina.

1947: US statesman George Marshall proposes the 'Marshall Plan' - an aid programme for European reconstruction.

1967: The Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours begins with a crushing Israeli pre-emptive strike.