What Happened on June 11th in History
30 historical events on this date
Inventor Edwin Armstrong demonstrates FM broadcasting to an audience of engineers at the FCC in Washington, DC.
Edwin Howard Armstrong was an American radio-frequency engineer and inventor who developed FM radio and the superheterodyne receiver system.
Great Purge: The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin executes eight army leaders.
The Great Purge or Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid...
Second Sino-Japanese War: The Battle of Wuhan starts.
The Second Sino-Japanese War, known in China as the War of Resistance Against Japan, was fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan and its puppet states between 1937 and 1945,...
World War II: The Siege of Malta begins with a series of Italian air raids.
World War II, or the Second World War, was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated. Tanks and aircraft played major...
World War II: The United States agrees to send Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union.
Lend-Lease, formally the Lend-Lease Act and introduced as An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, was a policy under which the United States supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet...
Free French Forces retreat from Bir Hakeim after having successfully delayed the Axis advance.
Free France was a resistance government claiming to be the legitimate government of France following the dissolution of the Third Republic during World War II. Led by General Charles de Gaulle, Free...
USS Missouri, the last battleship built by the United States Navy and future site of the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, is commissioned.
USS Missouri (BB-63) is an Iowa-class battleship built for the United States Navy (USN) in the 1940s and is now a museum ship. Completed in 1944, she is the last battleship commissioned by the...
Eighty-three spectators are killed and at least one hundred are injured after an Austin-Healey and a Mercedes-Benz collide at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the deadliest ever accident in motorsports.
Austin-Healey was a British sports car maker established in 1952 through a joint venture between the Austin division of the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and the Donald Healey Motor Company...
Start of Gal Oya riots, the first reported ethnic riots that target minority Sri Lankan Tamils in the Eastern Province. The total number of deaths is reportedly 150.
The 1956 anti-Tamil pogrom, also known as the Gal Oya riots, was the first organized pogrom against Sri Lankan Tamils in the Dominion of Ceylon. It began with anti-Tamil rioting in Colombo, followed...
Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin allegedly become the only prisoners to escape from the prison on Alcatraz Island.
On the night of June 11, 1962, inmates Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin escaped from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, the maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco...
American Civil Rights Movement: Governor of Alabama George Wallace defiantly stands at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school. Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they are able to register.
The civil rights movement was a social movement in the United States from 1954 to 1968 which aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country,...
Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns himself with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam.
Thích Quảng Đức was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who died by self-immolation at a busy Saigon road intersection on 11 June 1963. Quảng Đức was protesting against the persecution of Buddhists...
John F. Kennedy addresses Americans from the Oval Office proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would revolutionize American society by guaranteeing equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, also known as JFK, was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person elected president, at 43 years,...
World War II veteran Walter Seifert attacks an elementary school in Cologne, Germany, killing at least eight children and two teachers, and seriously injuring several more, with a home-made flamethrower and a lance.
The Cologne school massacre was a mass murder that occurred at the Catholic elementary school located in the suburb of Volkhoven in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany, on 11 June 1964....
Lloyd J. Old identifies the first cell surface antigens that could differentiate among different cell types.
Lloyd John Old was an American medical researcher, and one of the founders of the field of cancer immunology. When Old began his career in 1958, tumor immunology was in its infancy. Today, cancer...
After being appointed on May 15, Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington officially receive their ranks as U.S. Army general officers, becoming the first women to do so.
May 15 is the 135th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 230 days remain until the end of the year.
The U.S. Government forcibly removes the last holdouts to the Native American Occupation of Alcatraz, ending 19 months of control.
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the peoples who are native to the Americas or the Western Hemisphere. Their ancestors are among the pre-Columbian population of South or North America,...
Altaf Hussain founds the student political movement All Pakistan Muhajir Students Organisation (APMSO) in Karachi University.
Altaf Hussain is a British Pakistani politician who is known as the founder of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. He holds United Kingdom citizenship and has been living in exile in the UK since the...
A magnitude 6.9 earthquake at Golbaf, Iran, kills at least 2,000.
Golbaf is a city in, and the capital of, Golbaf District of Kerman County, Kerman province, Iran.
Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant are elected as the first black MPs in Great Britain.
Diane Julie Abbott is a British politician who has served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. She was the first black woman elected to the UK Parliament,...
Compaq Computer pays US$9 billion for Digital Equipment Corporation in the largest high-tech acquisition.
Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of...
Timothy McVeigh is executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Timothy James McVeigh was an American domestic terrorist who masterminded and perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995. The bombing itself killed 167 or 168 people, injured 684...
Antonio Meucci is acknowledged as the first inventor of the telephone by the United States Congress.
Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was an Italian inventor and an associate of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major political figure in the history of Italy. Meucci is best known for developing a...
Cassini–Huygens makes its closest flyby of the Saturn moon Phoebe.
Cassini–Huygens, commonly called Cassini, was a joint space-research mission by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to send a space probe to study the planet...
Mudslides in Chittagong, Bangladesh, kill 130 people.
The 2007 Chittagong mudslides occurred in the port city of Chittagong in south-eastern Bangladesh. On 11 June 2007, heavy monsoon rainfall caused mudslides that engulfed slums around the hilly areas...
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes a historic official apology to Canada's First Nations in regard to abuses at a Canadian Indian residential school.
The prime minister of Canada is the head of government of Canada. Under the Westminster system, the prime minister governs with the confidence of a majority of the elected House of Commons; as such,...
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is launched into orbit.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth...
The first FIFA World Cup held on African soil kicks off in South Africa.
The FIFA World Cup is an international association football competition among the senior men's national teams of the members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the...
Seventy-five people die in a landslide triggered by two earthquakes in Afghanistan; an entire village is buried.
On 11 June 2012, two moderate earthquakes struck northern Afghanistan, causing a large landslide. The landslide buried the town of Sayi Hazara, trapping 71 people. After four days of digging, only...
Greece's public broadcaster ERT is shut down by then-prime minister Antonis Samaras. It would be opened exactly two years later by then-prime minister Alexis Tsipras.
The Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, commonly shortened to ERT, is the state-owned public radio and television broadcaster of Greece.