June 13 Archives - PopHistory.org

Pioneer 10 departs solar system

Year: 1983

Month Day: June 13

After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the world’s first outer-planetary probe, leaves the solar system. The next day, it radioed back its first scientific data on interstellar space.

On March 2, 1972, the NASA spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet. In December 1973, after successfully negotiating the asteroid belt and a distance of 620 million miles, Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of the spectacular gas giant. On June 13, 1983, the NASA spacecraft left the solar system. NASA officially ended the Pioneer 10 project on March 31, 1997, with the spacecraft having traveled a distance of some six billion miles.

Headed in the direction of the Taurus constellation, Pioneer 10 will pass within three light years of another star–Ross 246–in the year 34,600 A.D. Bolted to the probe’s exterior wall is a gold-anodized plaque, 6 by 9 inches in area, that displays a drawing of a human man and woman, a star map marked with the location of the sun, and another map showing the flight path of Pioneer 10. The plaque, intended for intelligent life forms elsewhere in the galaxy, was designed by astronomer Carl Sagan.

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Peasant army marches into London

Year: 1381

Month Day: June 13

During the Peasants’ Revolt, a large mob of English peasants led by Wat Tyler marches into London and begins burning and looting the city. Several government buildings were destroyed, prisoners were released, and a judge was beheaded along with several dozen other leading citizens.

The Peasants’ Revolt had its origins in a severe manifestation of bubonic plague in the late 1340s, which killed nearly a third of the population of England. The scarcity of labor brought on by the Black Death led to higher wages and a more mobile peasantry. Parliament, however, resisted these changes to its traditional feudal system and passed laws to hold down wages while encouraging landlords to reassert their ancient manorial rights. In 1380, peasant discontent reached a breaking point when Parliament restricted voting rights through an increase of the poll tax, and the Peasants’ Revolt began.

In Kent, a county in southeast England, the rebels chose Wat Tyler as their leader, and he led his growing “army” toward London, capturing the towns of Maidstone, Rochester, and Canterbury along the way. After he was denied a meeting with King Richard II, he led the rebels into London on June 13, 1381, burning and plundering the city. The next day, the 14-year-old king met with peasant leaders at Mile End and agreed to their demands to abolish serfdom and restrictions on the marketplace. However, fighting continued elsewhere at the same time, and Tyler led a peasant force against the Tower of London, capturing the fortress and executing the archbishop of Canterbury.

On June 15, the king met Tyler at Smithfield, and Tyler presented new demands, including one calling for the abolishment of church property. During the meeting, the mayor of London, angered at Tyler’s arrogance in the presence of the king, lunged at the rebel leader with a sword, fatally wounding him. As Tyler lay dying on the ground, Richard managed to keep the peasant mob calm until the mayor returned with armed troops. Hundreds of rebels were executed and the rest dispersed. During the next few days, the Peasant Revolt was put down with severity all across England, and Richard revoked all the concessions he had made to the peasants at Mile End. For several weeks, Wat Tyler’s head was displayed on a pole in a London field.

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Thurgood Marshall appointed to Supreme Court

Year: 1967

Month Day: June 13

President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Thurgood Marshall to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Tom C. Clark. On August 30, after a heated debate, the Senate confirmed Marshall’s nomination by a vote of 69 to 11. Two days later, he was sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren, making him the first African American in history to sit on America’s highest court.

READ MORE: Black History Milestones

The great-grandson of slaves, Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908. In 1933, after studying under the tutelage of civil liberties lawyer Charles H. Houston, he received his law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1936, he joined the legal division of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Houston was director, and two years later succeeded his mentor in the organization’s top legal post.

As the NAACP’s chief counsel from 1938 to 1961, he argued 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully challenging racial segregation, most notably in public education. He won 29 of these cases, including a groundbreaking victory in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and was thus illegal. The decision served as a great impetus for the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and ultimately led to the abolishment of segregation in all public facilities and accommodations.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but his nomination was opposed by many Southern senators, and he was not confirmed until the next year. In June 1967, President Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court, and in late August he was confirmed. During his 24 years on the high court, Associate Justice Marshall consistently challenged discrimination based on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and supported the rights of criminal defendants. He also defended affirmative action and women’s right to reproductive freedom. As appointments by a largely Republican White House changed the politics of the Court, Marshall found his liberal opinions increasingly in the minority. He retired in 1991, and two years later passed away.

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Alexander the Great dies

Year: 323

Month Day: June 13

Alexander the Great, the young Macedonian military genius who forged an empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to India, dies in Babylon, in present-day Iraq, at the age of 33.

Born in Macedonia to King Phillip II and Queen Olympias, Alexander received a classical education from famed philosopher Aristotle and a military education from his father. At the age of 16, Alexander led his first troops into combat and two years later commanded a large part of his father’s army that won the Battle of Chaeronea and brought Greece under Macedonian rule. In 336 B.C., Phillip II was assassinated, and Alexander ascended to the throne.

Two years later, the young king led a large army into Asia Minor to carry out his father’s plans for conquering Persia. Consistently outnumbered in his battles against superior Persian forces, Alexander displayed an unprecedented understanding of strategic military planning and tactical maneuvers. He never lost a single battle, and by 330 B.C. all of Persia and Asia Minor was under his sway.

Although Alexander controlled the largest empire in the history of the world, he launched a new eastern campaign soon after his return from Persia. By 327 B.C., he had conquered Afghanistan, Central Asia, and northern India. In the next year, his army, exhausted after eight years of fighting, refused to go farther, and Alexander led them on a difficult journey home through the inhospitable Makran Desert.

Finally reaching Babylon, Alexander began constructing a large fleet to take his army back to Egypt. However, in June 323 B.C., just as the work on his ships was reaching its conclusion, Alexander fell sick and died. Perhaps earnestly believing himself to be a god (as many of his subjects did), he had not selected a successor, and within a year of his death his army and his empire broke into a multitude of warring factions. His body was later returned to Alexandria, where it was laid to rest in a golden coffin.

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The Miranda rights are established

Year: 1966

Month Day: June 13

On June 13, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision in Miranda v. Arizona, establishing the principle that all criminal suspects must be advised of their rights before interrogation. Now considered standard police procedure, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you,” has been heard so many times in television and film dramas that it has become almost cliche.

The roots of the Miranda decision go back to March 2, 1963, when an 18-year-old Phoenix woman told police that she had been abducted, driven to the desert and raped. Detectives questioning her story gave her a polygraph test, but the results were inconclusive. However, tracking the license plate number of a car that resembled that of her attacker’s brought police to Ernesto Miranda, who had a prior record as a peeping tom. Although the victim did not identify Miranda in a line-up, he was brought into police custody and interrogated. What happened next is disputed, but officers left the interrogation with a confession that Miranda later recanted, unaware that he didn’t have to say anything at all.

The confession was extremely brief and differed in certain respects from the victim’s account of the crime. However, Miranda’s appointed defense attorney (who was paid a grand total of $100) didn’t call any witnesses at the ensuing trial, and Miranda was convicted. While Miranda was in Arizona state prison, the American Civil Liberties Union took up his appeal, claiming that the confession was false and coerced.

The Supreme Court overturned his conviction, but Miranda was retried and convicted in October 1966 anyway, despite the relative lack of evidence against him. Remaining in prison until 1972, Ernesto Miranda was later stabbed to death in the men’s room of a bar after a poker game in January 1976.

As a result of the case against Miranda, each and every person must now be informed of his or her rights when in custody and about to be interrogated.

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The New York Times publishes the “Pentagon Papers”

Year: 1971

Month Day: June 13

The New York Times begins publishing portions of the 47-volume Pentagon analysis of how the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia grew over a period of three decades. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had become an antiwar activist, had stolen the documents. After unsuccessfully offering the documents to prominent opponents of the war in the U.S. Senate, Ellsberg gave them to the Times.

Officially called The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam, the “Pentagon Papers” disclosed closely guarded communiques, recommendations, and decisions concerning the U.S. military role in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, along with the diplomatic phase in the Eisenhower years. The publication of the papers created a nationwide furor, with congressional and diplomatic reverberations as all branches of the government debated over what constituted “classified” material and how much should be made public.

READ MORE: What Were the Pentagon Papers?

The publication of the documents precipitated a crucial legal battle over “the people’s right to know,” and led to an extraordinary session of the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the issue. Although the documents were from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, President Richard Nixon opposed their publication, both to protect the sources in highly classified appendices, and to prevent further erosion of public support for the war. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had the right to publish the material.

The publication of the “Pentagon Papers,” along with previous suspected disclosures of classified information to the press, led to the creation of a White House unit to plug information leaks to journalists. The illegal activities of the unit, known as the “Plumbers,” and their subsequent cover-up, became known collectively as the Watergate scandal, which resulted in President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

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Thomas Jefferson subpoenaed in Aaron Burr’s treason trial

Year: 1807

Month Day: June 13

President Thomas Jefferson receives a subpoena to testify in the treason trial of his former vice president, Aaron Burr, on June 13, 1807. In the subpoena, Burr asked Jefferson to produce documents that might exonerate him.

Burr had already been politically and socially disgraced by killing former Treasury secretary and Revolutionary-era hero Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. After killing Hamilton, Burr, still Jefferson’s vice president, went into hiding. Burr then concocted a seditious plan to enlist the help of Britain and Spain to create a separate nation in the southwestern reaches of the American continent, including parts of Mexico, over which Burr would rule. The outrageous plan failed miserably when one of Burr’s co-conspirators, General James Wilkinson, betrayed Burr and alerted Jefferson to the plot. Burr was hunted down and arrested in 1806 and indicted for treason.

Jefferson expressed in his personal papers that he felt no love or loyalty to Burr despite their former political relationship. Burr had run a close and contentious election against the republican Jefferson in the 1800 campaign. After the election resulted in a tie, the vote went to the House of Representatives. Only after Alexander Hamilton reluctantly lobbied for Jefferson did the House select Jefferson for the presidency instead of Burr. This was only one of the many grievances Burr held against Hamilton that led to the fatal duel.

Jefferson refused to appear in Burr’s defense and released only a few of the documents Burr had requested, invoking his presidential right to protect the public interest. If Jefferson’s intent was to help get Burr convicted, his refusal to supply documentation backfired. In the end, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall found Burr not guilty by lack of evidence.

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Meriwether Lewis reaches the Great Falls

Year: 1805

Month Day: June 13

Having hurried ahead of the main body of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four men arrive at the Great Falls of the Missouri River, confirming that the explorers are headed in the right direction.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had set out on their expedition to the Pacific the previous year. They spent the winter of 1804 with the Mandan Indians in present-day North Dakota. The Hidatsa Indians, who lived nearby, had traveled far to the West, and they proved an important source of information for Lewis and Clark. The Hidatsa told Lewis and Clark they would come to a large impassable waterfall in the Missouri when they neared the Rocky Mountains, but they assured the captains that portage around the falls was less than half a mile.

Armed with this valuable information, Lewis and Clark resumed their journey up the Missouri accompanied by a party of 33 in April. The expedition made good time, and by early June, the explorers were nearing the Rocky Mountains. On June 3, however, they came to a fork at which two equally large rivers converged. “Which of these rivers was the Missouri?” Lewis asked in his journal. Since the river coming in from the north most resembled the Missouri in its muddy turbulence, most of the men believed it must be the Missouri. Lewis, however, reasoned that the water from the Missouri would have traveled only a short distance from the mountains and, therefore, would be clear and fast-running like the south fork.

The decision was critical. If the explorers chose the wrong river, they would not be able to find the Shoshone Indians from whom they planned to obtain horses for the portage over the Rockies. Although all of their men disagreed, Lewis and Clark concluded they should proceed up the south fork. To err on the side of caution, however, the captains decided that Lewis and a party of four would speed ahead on foot. If Lewis did not soon encounter the big waterfall the Hidatsa had told them of, the party would return and the expedition would backtrack to the other river.

On this day in 1805, four days after forging ahead of the main body of the expedition, Lewis was overjoyed to hear “the agreeable sound of a fall of water.” Soon after he “saw the spray arise above the plain like a column of smoke…. [It] began to make a roaring too tremendous to be mistaken for any cause short of the great falls of the Missouri.” By noon, Lewis had reached the falls, where he stared in awe at “a sublimely grand specticle [sic]… the grandest sight I had ever held.”

Lewis and Clark had been correct—the south fork was the Missouri River. The mysterious northern fork was actually the Marias River. Had the explorers followed the Marias, they would have traveled up into the northern Rockies where a convenient pass led across the mountains into the Columbia River drainage. However, Lewis and Clark would not have found the Shoshone Indians nor obtained the horses. Without horses, the crossing might well have failed.

Three days after finding the falls, Lewis rejoined Clark and told him the good news. However, the captains’ elation did not last long. They soon discovered that the portage around the Great Falls was not the easy half-mile jaunt reported by the Hidatsa, but rather a punishing 18-mile trek over rough terrain covered with spiky cactus. The Great Portage, as it was later called, would take the men nearly a month to complete. By mid-July, however, the expedition was again moving ahead. A month later, Lewis and Clark found the Shoshone Indians, who handed over the horses that were so critical to the subsequent success of their mission.

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Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” released

Year: 1962

Month Day: June 13

“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” was the question posed by the posters advertising Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famously controversial novel, released on June 13, 1962.

Four years earlier, Kubrick, director of the big-budget Roman epic Spartacus (1960), and his partner, producer James B. Harris, bought the film rights to Nabokov’s masterfully crafted novel. Its plot revolved around the middle-aged Humbert Humbert and his unseemly obsession with young girls—whom he called “nymphets”—and with one young girl in particular, Dolores Haze, or Lolita. Nabokov received sole credit for the screenplay, which had in fact been significantly revised by Kubrick and Harris after the novelist initially submitted a 400-page draft. He later cut it down at their request, but the filmmakers still made extensive changes.

One of Kubrick’s biggest challenges was finding an actress to play the title character. Child stars Tuesday Weld and Hayley Mills were reportedly among those actresses considered for the role. After a nationwide casting search, the filmmakers eventually settled on 14-year-old Sue Lyon, who had appeared on television but would be making her big-screen debut. Though the character of Lolita was only 12 years old in Nabokov’s book, her age was increased to 14 or 15 in the screenplay in order to lessen the implication of pedophilia. James Mason starred as Humbert; Noel Coward, David Niven and Rex Harrison had all been possibilities but had declined due to fears about playing the unsympathetic character. In supporting roles, Shelley Winters played Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, and the famed comic actor Peter Sellers was Quilty, a mysterious character whose role in the plot Kubrick significantly expanded from the novel.

The film’s posters played up the controversial nature of the film’s content and the book’s reputation, using the provocative tagline above a picture of Lyon-as-Lolita, wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and a seductive expression, with a lollipop in her mouth. Lolita received mixed reviews—The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael was one critic who raved about the film—but its acting was widely praised. The film earned one Academy Award nomination, for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Kubrick himself lamented that due to opposition from the film industry’s censorship group, known as the Production Code, and the Roman Catholic League of Decency, and their threats to ban the movie, he couldn’t give proper weight to Humbert’s erotic obsession with Lolita. When interviewed by Newsweek magazine in 1972, Kubrick said that he “probably wouldn’t have made the film” if he had known how severe the censorship standards would be. Another big-screen Lolita was released in 1997, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Jeremy Irons and the then-unknown 15-year-old Dominique Swain. Though it bombed at the box office, the film was seen by many as a more accurate depiction of Nabokov’s novel than Kubrick’s had been.

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Jurors begin deliberations in Susan Polk trial

Year: 2006

Month Day: June 13

On June 13, 2006, jurors began deliberations in the trial of Susan Polk, 48, for the October 2002 murder of her psychotherapist husband Felix Polk, 70, in a poolside cottage at the couple’s Orinda, California, home. Felix was stabbed and cut 27 times and had suffered blunt force trauma to the head.

Susan and Felix met when Susan was a teenager under his psychological care. According to Polk, they began a sexual relationship while she was still in her teens, and married when she was 24 and he was 40. The couple, who had raised three sons together, was in the midst of an ugly divorce at the time of Felix’s murder. Two of the sons testified against their mother at the trial, which was characterized by Susan’s strange courtroom behavior and frequent outbursts.

Prosecutors theorized that, upon learning that she might lose the couple’s valuable house, a large portion of spousal support and custody of her youngest child in the divorce, Susan made a surprise visit to the cottage, in which Felix was staying, and then hit him on the head with a flashlight before stabbing him to death. After her husband was found dead, police found Susan to have bruise-like marks around her eyes, bite marks on her hand and a welt on her shoulder, though she initially denied any involvement in Felix’s death. After her DNA was found at the scene of the crime, she went public with a story that she had stabbed Felix in self-defense, and that he had drugged and raped her as a teenager and then physically abused her on a daily basis throughout their marriage. Susan also admitted to tampering with evidence, including washing and putting away the murder weapon, washing her clothes and abandoning her husband’s car at a train station.

Susan, who represented herself at trial, claimed that she had been attacked by Felix with the knife, and had stabbed him after managing to wrestle the knife away from him. According to a defense medical witness, Felix died of a heart attack while attacking Susan and then fell on the floor and hit his head.

On June 16, 2005, Susan Polk was found guilty of second-degree murder. Afterward, jurors explained that they had found her testimony and her account of Felix’s death and difficult to believe. She was later sentenced to 16 months to life in prison, the maximum penalty.

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