1944 – The experimental MW 18014 V-2 rocket reaches an altitude of 176 km, becoming the first man-made object to reach outer space.

1877 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world's first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

1964 – The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.

1846 – The first officially recorded, organized baseball game is played under Alexander Cartwright's rules on Hoboken, New Jersey's Elysian Fields with the New York Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbockers 23–1. Cartwright umpired.

1948 – Columbia Records introduces the long-playing record album in a public demonstration at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.

1858 – Charles Darwin receives a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace that includes nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin's own, prompting Darwin to publish his theory.

On this day in the year 2 AD, the sun rose in the east and set in the west.  Reports say that the sunset was meh.

2021 – Juneteenth National Independence Day, was signed into law by President Joe Biden, to become the first federal holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

1987 – With the death of the last individual of the species, the dusky seaside sparrow becomes extinct.

1972 – Watergate scandal: Five White House operatives are arrested for burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee during an attempt by members of the administration of President Richard M. Nixon to illegally wiretap the political opposition as part of a broader campaign to subvert the democratic process.

1967 – Nuclear weapons testing: China announces a successful test of its first thermonuclear weapon.

1963 – The United States Supreme Court rules 8–1 in Abington School District v. Schempp against requiring the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer in public schools.

1930 – U.S. President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act into law.

2015 – Donald Trump announces his campaign to run for President of the United States in the upcoming election.

1977 – Oracle Corporation is incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL), by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates.

1961 – While on tour with the Kirov Ballet in Paris, Rudolf Nureyev defects from the Soviet Union.

1911 – IBM founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York.

1884 – The first purpose-built roller coaster, LaMarcus Adna Thompson's "Switchback Railway", opens in New York's Coney Island amusement park.

1824 – A meeting at Old Slaughter's coffee house in London leads to the formation of what is now the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).

1878 – Eadweard Muybridge takes a series of photographs to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs; the study becomes the basis of motion pictures.