A few of the great historical events that happened today in history, June 5th!
| 1099 | Members of the First Crusade witness an eclipse of the moon and interpret it as a sign they will recapture Jerusalem. |
| 1568 | Ferdinand, the Duke of Alba, crushes the Calvinist insurrection in Ghent. |
| 1595 | Henry IV’s army defeats the Spanish at the Battle of Fontaine-Francaise. |
| 1637 | American settlers in New England massacre a Pequot Indian village. |
| 1783 | Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier make the first public balloon flight. |
| 1794 | The U.S. Congress prohibits citizens from serving in any foreign armed forces. |
| 1827 | Athens falls to Ottoman forces. |
| 1851 | Harriet Beecher Stow publishes the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in The National Era. |
| 1856 | U.S. Army troops in the Four creeks region of California, head back to quarters, officially ending the Tule River War. Fighting, however, will continue for a few more years. |
| 1863 | The Confederate raider CSS Alabama captures the Talisman in the Mid-Atlantic. |
| 1872 | The Republican National Convention, the first major political party convention to includes blacks, commences. |
| 1880 | Wild woman of the west Myra Maybelle Shirley marries Sam Starr even though records show she was already married to Bruce Younger. |
| 1900 | British troops under Lord Roberts seize Pretoria from the Boers. |
| 1933 | The United States went off the gold standard. |
| 1940 | The German army begins its offensive in Southern France. |
| 1944 | The first B-29 bombing raid strikes the Japanese rail line in Bangkok, Thailand. |
| 1947 | Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlines “The Marshall Plan,” a program intended to assist European nations, including former enemies, to rebuild their economies. |
| 1956 | Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounces Josef Stalin to the Soviet Communist Party Congress. |
| 1967 | The Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan begins. |
| 1968 | Sirhan Sirhan shoots Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy after Kennedy’s victory in the pivotal California primary election. |
| 1973 | Doris A. Davis becomes the first African-American woman to govern a city in a major metropolitan area when she is elected mayor of Compton, California. |
| 1981 | The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that five homosexuals in Los Angeles had come down with a rare kind of pneumonia; they were the first recognized cases of what became known as AIDS. |
| 2002 | Elizabeth Smart, 14, was kidnapped from her bedroom in her family’s Salt Lake City home. (She was rescued in March 2003.) |
| 2004 | Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, died in Los Angeles at age 93 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. |
| 2007 | Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation. (President George W. Bush later commuted the prison sentence.) |
Today in History facts are from various sites including, but not limited too: the History Channel, The New York Times, WHG Historynet.com, and HistoryOrb.com.














