First Posted: 5/21/2014
The History Channel
* On June 14, 1789, English Capt. William Bligh and 18 others, cast adrift from the HMS Bounty in a mutiny seven weeks before, reach Timor in the East Indies after traveling nearly 4,000 miles in a small, open boat. Bligh would fall prey to a total of three mutinies in his career.
* On June 13, 1895, Emile Levassor drives a Panhard et Levassor across the finish line in Paris to win the world’s first automobile race, completing the 732-mile course in 49 hours — an average of 15 mph. His car was powered by a two-cylinder, 750 rpm, four-horsepower Daimler Phoenix engine.
* On June 15, 1904, more than 1,000 people taking a pleasure trip on New York City’s East River are drowned or burned to death when a fire sweeps through the boat. The onboard fire hose did not work, and life preservers had been filled with a weighty, non-buoyant material that sank.
* On June 10, 1935, two recovering alcoholics, one a New York broker and the other an Ohio physician, found Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), a 12-step rehabilitation program. Today there are more than 80,000 local groups in the United States.
* On June 9, 1973, Secretariat wins the Belmont Stakes to become the first Triple Crown winner since Citation in 1948. Secretariat’s heart was later found to weigh 22 pounds, more than twice that of a typical thoroughbred.
* On June 11, 1989, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, China issues a warrant for Fang Lizhi, a leading Chinese dissident, who had taken refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. The diplomatic standoff lasted for a year before Fang and his wife, Li Shuxian, were given free passage out of the country.
* On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson, football star O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, and her friend Ron Goldman are stabbed to death outside Nicole’s California home. With overwhelming evidence against Simpson, including his blood at the murder scene, Brown’s and Goldman’s hair and blood in his car and bloody shoeprints found at the scene, Simpson became the chief suspect. He later was tried and acquitted.
