Historical Events on this Day in History - per Wikipedia

June 26

• 221 – Roman Emperor Elagabalus adopts his cousin Alexander Severus as his heir and receives the title of Caesar.
• 363 – Roman Emperor Julian is killed during the retreat from the Sassanid Empire. General Jovian is proclaimed Emperor by the troops on the battlefield.
• 1284 – the legendary Pied Piper leads 130 children out of Hamelin, Germany
• 1409 – Western Schism: the Roman Catholic church is led into a double schism as Petros Philargos is crowned Pope Alexander V after the Council of Pisa, joining Pope Gregory XII in Rome and Pope Benedict XII in Avignon.
• 1541 – Francisco Pizarro is assassinated in Lima by the son of his former companion and later antagonist, Diego Almagro the younger. Almagro is later caught and executed.
• 1718 – Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich of Russia, Peter the Great's son, mysteriously dies after being sentenced to death by his father for plotting against him.
• 1723 – After a siege and bombardment by cannon, Baku surrenders to the Russians.
• 1848 – End of the June Days Uprising in Paris.
• 1857 – The first investiture of the Victoria Cross in Hyde Park, London.
• 1870 – The Christian holiday of Christmas is declared a federal holiday in the United States.
• 1907 – The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery took place in Yerevan Square, now Freedom Square, Tbilisi.
• 1909 – The Science Museum in London comes into existence as an independent entity.
• 1917 – The first U.S. troops arrive in France to fight alongside Britain and France against Germany in World War I.
• 1918 – World War I, Western Front: Battle for Belleau Wood – Allied Forces under John J. Pershing and James Harbord defeat Imperial German Forces under Wilhelm, German Crown Prince.
• 1924 – American occupying forces leave the Dominican Republic.
• 1927 – The Cyclone roller coaster opens on Coney Island.
• 1934 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Federal Credit Union Act, which establishes credit unions.
• 1936 – Initial flight of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, the first practical helicopter.
• 1940 – World War II: under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union presents an ultimatum to Romania requiring it to cede Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina.
• 1941 – World War II: Soviet planes bomb Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), giving Hungary the impetus to declare war the next day.
• 1942 – The first flight of the Grumman F6F Hellcat.
• 1945 – The United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco.
• 1948 – The Western allies begin an airlift to Berlin after the Soviet Union blockades West Berlin.
• 1948 – William Shockley files the original patent for the grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
• 1948 – Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery is published in The New Yorker magazine.
• 1952 – The Pan-Malayan Labour Party is founded in Malaya, as a union of statewise labour parties.
• 1953 – Lavrentiy Beria,head of MVD, is arrested by Nikita Khrushchev and other members of the Politburo.
• 1955 – The South African Congress Alliance adopts the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People in Kliptown.
• 1959 – The Saint Lawrence Seaway opens, opening North America's Great Lakes to ocean-going ships.
• 1960 – The former British Protectorate of British Somaliland gains its independence as Somaliland .
• 1960 – Madagascar gains its independence from France.
• 1973 – At Plesetsk Cosmodrome 9 people are killed in an explosion of a Cosmos 3-M rocket.
• 1974 – The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio
• 1975 – Two FBI agents and a member of the American Indian Movement are killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota; Leonard Peltier is later convicted of the murders in a controversial trial.
• 1977 – The Yorkshire Ripper kills 16 year old shop assistant Jayne MacDonald in Leeds, changing public perception of the killer as she is the first victim who is not a prostitute.
• 1978 – Air Canada Flight 189 to Toronto overruns the runway and crashes into the Etobicoke Creek ravine. Two of 107 passengers on board perish.
• 1991 – Ten-Day War: the Yugoslav people's army begins the Ten-Day War in Slovenia.
• 1995 – Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani deposes his father Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, in a bloodless coup.
• 1996 – Irish Journalist Veronica Guerin is shot in her car while in traffic in the outskirts of Dublin
• 1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Communications Decency Act violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
• 2003 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence v. Texas that gender-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional.
• 2006 – Mari Alkatiri, the first Prime Minister of East Timor, resigns after weeks of political unrest.
• 2008 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual right, and that the District of Columbia handgun ban is unconstitutional.