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Made for the 250thOn this day › June 23
What happened on June 23 in American history
June 23 is the 174th day of the year (the 175th in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 19 stories from June 23 spanning 1683 to 2005. Among them: in 1683, Penn sits with Tamanend at Shackamaxon; the two men sign a treaty of friendship; and in 1780, Greene holds every road; Knyphausen burns Springfield and retreats.
1683Member story · 1776 Club
Penn sits with Tamanend at Shackamaxon; the two men sign a treaty of friendship
Most colonial governors deal with the Lenape through force or fraud, but the English Quaker insists Native Americans hold rights worth respecting.
1780Member story · 1776 Club
Greene holds every road; Knyphausen burns Springfield and retreats
Continental troops and New Jersey militia blunt both British columns at the Rahway crossings, and the redcoats leave nearly the whole town in ashes as they pull back.
1860Member story · 1776 Club
Congress ends decades of patronage printing; a federal office will do the work itself
A joint resolution creates the Government Printing Office, replacing private contractors blamed for inflated costs and uneven quality across all three branches.
1865Member story · 1776 Club
Stand Watie signs the last Confederate surrender, at Doaksville in the Choctaw Nation
The Cherokee general and principal chief lays down arms nearly two months after Appomattox, his First Indian Brigade of Cherokee, Muskogee, and Seminole fighters the final force to quit the field.
1868Member story · 1776 Club
Sholes, Soule and Glidden patent the "Type-Writer"; its keys are laid out like a small piano
The first document the Milwaukee-built machine ever produced was a city contract, typed by Sholes himself in his role as city comptroller.
1926Member story · 1776 Club
College Board gives its new aptitude test to 8,040 students; Yale and Smith account for more than half
Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham modeled the 200–800-scale exam on Army IQ tests from the war, as elite colleges seek an alternative to prep-school pedigree.
1931Member story · 1776 Club
Post and Gatty land at Roosevelt Field; the world is circled in 8 days, 15 hours
The two men left this same field nine days ago in a single-engine Vega; Eckener's Zeppelin took 21 days to do what Winnie Mae just did in fewer than nine.
1938Member story · 1776 Club
Roosevelt signs the Civil Aeronautics Act; federal hands take the wheel on American skies
The new Civil Aeronautics Authority inherits air traffic control, safety standards, and economic oversight from a patchwork system the airlines themselves had begged Washington to replace.
1947Member story · 1776 Club
Senate joins House to override Truman; Taft-Hartley becomes law over his veto
Enough Democrats broke with the president to give the Republican 80th Congress its win; the new law bans closed shops, curbs strikes, and demands union officers swear they are not communists.
1951Member story · 1776 Club
Lucile Connally christens the SS United States; the largest ocean liner built in America slides into the water at Newport News
Designed by William Francis Gibbs and launched from a dry dock for the first time in ocean-liner history, she is built to carry tourists in peace and divisions of soldiers to war.
1959Member story · 1776 Club
Fuchs walks free after nine years; the man who handed Moscow the implosion bomb flies to Dresden
British law allowed no more: the Manhattan Project physicist, stripped of his citizenship, served the maximum sentence for passing secrets to an ally.
1961
Twelve nations' Antarctic pact takes force; military operations and nuclear tests are now banned on the continent
The agreement, signed in 1959 after Argentine marines fired on British researchers, designates everything south of 60°S as a scientific preserve open to all signatories.
1967Member story · 1776 Club
Johnson and Kosygin meet at a New Jersey college; no deals, but the two men talk
With Vietnam bleeding and the Six-Day War just over, the leaders of both nuclear powers convene at Hollybush Mansion in Glassboro, a compromise between Washington and New York.
1969Member story · 1776 Club
IBM puts a price on software; hardware and code will no longer come as one
Starting January 1970, IBM will bill programs and services separately from its machines, opening space for independent vendors to compete on price for the first time.
1969Member story · 1776 Club
Earl Warren swears in his own successor; Burger takes the center chair
Nixon's nominee, confirmed 74–3, inherits the docket of the court his patron spent six years campaigning against.
1972
Nixon signs 37 words into law; no federal program may turn away a student on the basis of sex
Senator Birch Bayh's passage, buried in the Education Amendments of 1972, draws almost no public attention at the signing.
1972
Nixon tells Haldeman to use the CIA to block the FBI's Watergate inquiry
Six days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the Oval Office recording system captures the President invoking national security to shut down investigators.
1994Member story · 1776 Club
NASA opens a $56 million steel-and-concrete hangar at Kennedy to assemble the space station
The 457,000-square-foot Space Station Processing Facility opens after the Operations and Checkout Building ran out of room for ISS hardware.
2005Member story · 1776 Club
Huffman and Ohanian launch Reddit from Medford; Huffman coded the whole site in Common Lisp
The two UVA roommates spent spring break building what they call "the front page of the Internet" after their mobile food-ordering pitch went nowhere.
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