If there are two things Americans love deeply, it’s cars and movies. On June 6, 1933, Richard Hollingshead opened the first official drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey. Patrons paid a quarter to see the British comedy Wives Beware from the comfort of their automobiles. …
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In a remote cemetery outside São Paulo, Brazilian officials exhumed a grave on June 6, 1985, bearing the name “Wolfgang Gerhard.” For years, it had been largely unremarkable—until intelligence from West German investigators indicated it might conceal one of the last great fugitives of…
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In a quiet but fateful moment on June 5, 1851, the abolitionist newspaper The National Era published the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, a serialized novel by a relatively unknown New England woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe. The…
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On June 4, 1919, the United States Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, formally initiating the final phase of a political struggle that had spanned more than seven decades. With the stroke of a legislative pen, Congress did not merely advance a…
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On June 3, 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia—ragged, proud, and buoyed by recent triumph—began its long march out of war-ravaged Virginia and into the lush, unbloodied countryside of Pennsylvania. At its head rode General Robert E. Lee, whose strategic genius and battlefield audacity…
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Shortly before midnight on June 2, 1919, a powerful explosion tore through the Washington, D.C., home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The blast shattered windows, damaged neighboring houses, and ripped apart the front of Palmer’s residence. Palmer, his wife, and their young daughter…
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The French Revolution crossed a fatal threshold on June 2, 1793, when François Hanriot, a failed clerk turned militant commander of the Paris National Guard, surrounded the National Convention at cannon-point and arrested 22 leading Girondist deputies—on orders not of the people, but of…
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On June 1, 1974, a short article appeared in the journal Emergency Medicine offering a remarkably simple answer to one of the most terrifying medical emergencies imaginable. A person eating dinner suddenly clutched his throat. He could not speak. He could not breathe. Within…
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By the final day of May 1864, the American Civil War had entered a new and increasingly brutal phase. For nearly four weeks, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had driven the Union Army of the Potomac southward through Virginia, refusing to retreat after battles…
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On May 30, 1431, in the Norman city of Rouen, the English-dominated tribunal that had spent months trying to destroy Joan of Arc finally delivered her to the fire. She was nineteen years old, a peasant girl from Domrémy who had become, in the…
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