1794Admiral Howe wins the Glorious First of June
In the spring of 1794 revolutionary France was short of food, and a great convoy of merchant ships was sailing from Chesapeake Bay with American grain. The French Atlantic fleet under Rear-Admiral Villaret de Joyeuse put to sea to protect it, and Britain’s Channel Fleet under Admiral Lord Howe, then 68 years old, went out to find them. After days of manoeuvring, the two fleets met about 400 nautical miles west of Ushant on 1 June.
Howe led the attack in his flagship Queen Charlotte, breaking through the French line and engaging at close range. Six French ships of the line were captured and a seventh, the Vengeur du Peuple, sank. It was the first great fleet battle of the French Revolutionary Wars and Britain celebrated a triumph, but the French could claim success too: the grain convoy reached France almost intact.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Dictionary of National Biography: Howe, Richard ↗
1796Tennessee becomes the 16th state of the Union
West of the Appalachian Mountains, the lands that North Carolina had handed to the federal government became the Southwest Territory in 1790. A territory could ask to become a state once it had 60,000 inhabitants, and a census in 1795 counted more than 77,000. Delegates met at Knoxville in January 1796, wrote a constitution and approved it on 6 February, and sent it to Congress.
The House of Representatives agreed quickly, but the Federalist-controlled Senate held back until the last day of the session, and set conditions that cut the new state’s representation. On 1 June 1796 Tennessee was admitted as the sixteenth state, the first to be created from a federal territory. John Sevier became its first governor, and the path it took became the model for later territories.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Tennessee Encyclopedia (Tennessee Historical Society): Southwest Territory ↗
1963Kenya takes charge of its own government
Kenya had been a British colony since 1920, and the 1950s brought the Mau Mau uprising, a long state of emergency and the detention of thousands of Kenyans, among them the nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta. By the early 1960s Britain had accepted that independence was coming. Kenyatta was released in 1961, and in May 1963 Kenyans voted in elections that gave his party, the Kenya African National Union, a clear majority.
On 1 June 1963 Kenya gained internal self-government, with Kenyatta as its first prime minister, while Britain still kept responsibility for defence and foreign affairs. Full independence followed on 12 December that year. Kenyans remember the June milestone as Madaraka Day, from the Swahili for power or authority, and it remains a national public holiday.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Kenya Law: Public Holidays Act (Madaraka Day, 1 June) ↗
2009Air France Flight 447 is lost over the Atlantic
On the evening of 31 May 2009 an Air France Airbus A330 left Rio de Janeiro for Paris with 228 people on board. In the early hours of 1 June, flying through storm clouds high over the Atlantic, the airliner disappeared from contact. Wreckage was found within days, but the flight recorders lay nearly four kilometres down on the ocean floor and were only recovered in 2011, after a long search.
The French investigators, the BEA, found that ice crystals had blocked the probes that measure airspeed. The autopilot disconnected, and in the confusion that followed the aircraft climbed, lost speed and stalled, falling into the sea. No one survived. The accident led to changes in how pilots around the world are trained to handle unreliable instruments and to recover from a stall at high altitude.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: BEA (French civil aviation safety investigation authority): Final report on the accident to flight AF 447 ↗
