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In 1692, the first execution resulting from the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts took place as Bridget Bishop was hanged.
In 1907, eleven men in five cars set out from the French embassy in Beijing on a race to Paris. (Prince Scipione Borghese of Italy was the first to arrive in the French capital two months later.)
In 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in Akron, Ohio, by Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act of 1963, aimed at eliminating wage disparities based on gender.
In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon lifted a two-decades-old trade embargo on China.
In 1977, James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee with six others; he was recaptured June 13.
In 1978, Affirmed, ridden by Steve Cauthen, won the 110th Belmont Stakes to claim horse racing’s 11th Triple Crown.
In 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard of South Lake Tahoe, California, was abducted by Phillip and Nancy Garrido; Jaycee was held by the couple for 18 years before she was found by authorities.
In 2009, James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist, opened fire in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., killing security guard Stephen T. Johns. (Von Brunn died at a North Carolina hospital in January 2010 while awaiting trial.)
In 2013, a trial began in Sanford, Florida, in the trial of neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. (Zimmerman was acquitted.)
In 2016, Muhammad Ali was laid to rest in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, after an all-day send-off. “Mr. Hockey” Gordie Howe, who set scoring records that stood for decades, died in Sylvania, Ohio, at 88.
In 2020, protesters pulled down a century-old statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy.
In 2022, Britney Spears married her longtime partner Sam Asghari at a Southern California ceremony that came months after the pop superstar won her freedom from a court conservatorship. (Asghari would file for divorce 14 months later.)
In 2023, Ted Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician known as the “Unabomber” who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died at a federal prison medical center.