Today in History Tuesday June 18

618 – Coronation of the Chinese governor Li Yuan as Emperor Gaozu of Tang, the new Emperor of China, initiating three centuries of the Tang Dynasty’s rule over China.

860 – Swedish Vikings attack Constantinople

1178 – Five monks at Canterbury report explosion on moon (only known observation)

1682 – William Penn founds Philadelphia

1812 – War of 1812 begins as US declares war against Britain

1873 – Susan B Anthony fined $100 for voting for President

1940 – Gen Charles de Gaulle on BBC tells French to defy nazi occupiers

1953 – USAF C124 Globemaster crashes near Tokyo killing 129 servicemen

1959 – Governor of Louisiana Earl K. Long is committed to a state mental hospital; he responds by having the hospital’s director fired and replaced with a crony who proceeds to proclaim him perfectly sane.

1977 – Space Shuttle test model “Enterprise” carries a crew aloft for 1st time, It was fixed to a modified Boeing 747

1996 – Ted Kaczynski, suspected of being the Unabomber, is indicted on ten criminal counts.

When asked if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison, Kaczynski replied:

“No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.”

In 2012, Kaczynski submitted his current information to the Harvard University alumni association. He listed his eight life sentences as achievements, his current occupation as prisoner, and his current address as No. 04475-046, US Penitentiary-Max, P.O. Box 8500, Florence, CO 81226-8500

In 1995, he sent a letter to The New York Times and promised to “desist from terrorism” if The Times or The Washington Post published his essay, Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require large-scale organization.

1723 – Giuseppe Scarlotti, composer

1854 – Edward Wyllis Scripps, publisher/journalist

1886 – George Mallory, England, mountain climber (“because it is there”)

1913 – Sammy Cahn, lyricist

1915 – Red Adair, oilman (fought oil fires in Kuwait)

1942 – Paul McCartney, Liverpool

1952 – Isabella Rossellini, Rome Italy, actress (Big Night, Blue Velvet)

1629 – Piet Hein, Dutch naval commander (Spanish silver fleet) and folk hero (b. 1577) shot by cannonball at 51

1982 – John Cheever, Pulitzer prize winning author, dies at 70 in Ossining

1984 – Alan Berg, American radio talk show hostand attorney. An outspoken abrasive combative talk show host, he was murdered in his driveway by members of The Order, a white nationalist group who took umbrage at his comments.