Today in History: June 28, Treaty of Versailles is signed

Today in History:

On June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles (vehr-SY’) was signed in France, ending the First World War.

On this date:

In 1838, Britain’s Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

In 1863, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Maj. Gen. George G. Meade the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, following the resignation of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker.

In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, were shot to death in Sarajevo (sah-ruh-YAY’-voh) by Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip (gavh-REE’-loh PREEN’-seep) — an act that sparked World War I.

In 1939, Pan American Airways began regular trans-Atlantic air service with a flight that departed New York for Marseilles (mar-SAY’), France.

In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Alien Registration Act, also known as the Smith Act, which required adult foreigners residing in the U.S. to be registered and fingerprinted.

In 1950, North Korean forces captured Seoul (sohl), the capital of South Korea.

In 1978, the Supreme Court ordered the University of California-Davis Medical School to admit Allan Bakke (BAH’-kee), a white man who argued he’d been a victim of reverse racial discrimination.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton became the first chief executive in U.S. history to set up a personal legal defense fund and ask Americans to contribute to it.

In 2000, seven months after he was cast adrift in the Florida Straits, Elian Gonzalez was returned to his native Cuba.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that Americans had the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they lived.

In 2012, the Affordable Care Act narrowly survived, 5-4, an election-year battle at the U.S. Supreme Court with the improbable help of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting Cabinet member held in contempt of Congress, a rebuke pushed by Republicans seeking to unearth the facts behind a bungled gun-tracking operation known as Fast and Furious. (The vote was 255-67, with more than 100 Democrats boycotting.) Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise after five years of marriage.

In 2013, the four plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban tied the knot, just hours after a federal appeals court freed gay couples to obtain marriage licenses in the state for the first time in 4 1/2 years.

In 2017, republican donors paid $35,000 apiece to hear a familiar message from President Donald Trump: that the media, particularly CNN, kept trying to take him down, and yet Republicans just kept on winning elections. ABC and a South Dakota meat producer announced a settlement in a $1.9 billion lawsuit against the network over its reports on a beef product that critics dubbed “pink slime.”

In 2019, avowed white supremacist James Alex Fields, who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a young woman and injuring dozens, apologized to his victims before being sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges.

In 2021, temperatures in parts of the Pacific Northwest wiped out records that had been set the day before, with Seattle reaching 108 degrees by evening; meteorologists said the record-breaking heat was caused by a dome of high pressure, and worsened by human-caused climate change. Big-wave surfer Greg “Da Bull” Noll died at 84; he’d become a surfing legend by combining an outsized personality with the courage and skill to ride bigger, more powerful waves than anyone had attempted before.

In 2022, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for helping the wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse teenage girls.

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