Today's Highlight in History:
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed to the Continental Congress a resolution calling for American independence from Britain.
On this date:
In 1753, Britain's King George II gave his assent to an Act of Parliament establishing the British Museum.
In 1769, frontiersman Daniel Boone first began to explore present-day Kentucky.
In 1848, French Postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin was born in Paris.
In 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.
In 1937, actress Jean Harlow died in Los Angeles at age 26.
In 1948, the Communists completed their takeover of Czechoslovakia with the resignation of President Edvard Benes.
In 1967, the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic opened in San Francisco.
In 1967, author-critic Dorothy Parker, famed for her caustic wit, died in New York at age 73.
In 1972, the musical "Grease" opened on Broadway, having already been performed in lower Manhattan.
In 1981, Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons.
Ten years ago: In a crime that shocked the nation, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death for the crime; a third received life in prison.) At the Tony Awards, "The Lion King" won best musical and "Art" was named best play.
