On June 23, 1713, Queen Anne of England ordered French descendants in Nova Scotia to swear allegiance to her government or leave.
In 1836 a $28 million surplus in the U.S. Treasury was divided among the 26 states after Congress approved the Deposit Act.
In 1868 Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin journalist and state senator, received a patent for an invention he called the Type-Writer.
In 1931 aviators Wiley Post and Harold Catty took off from New York for a flight around the world.
In 1947 Congress overrode the veto of President Harry Truman and enacted the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited some activities of labor unions.
In 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser was elected president of Egypt.
In 1972 President Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, decided to use the CIA to obstruct the FBI's Watergate investigation. (A recording of this conversation--the Watergate "smoking gun"--would result in Nixon's resignation.)
In 1981 Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev accused the United States of evading negotiations to limit arms.
In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to shut down the dial-a-porn industry, ruling that Congress had gone too far in passing a law banning all sexually-oriented phone message services.
In 1995 Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the first vaccine to halt the crippling rampage of polio, died in La Jolla, Calif. He was 80.