Events on June 12 41
Year 910
Battle of Augsburg: The Hungarians defeat the East Frankish army under King Louis the Child, using the famous feigned retreat tactic of the nomadic warriors.
Year 1240
At the instigation of Louis IX of France, an inter-faith debate, known as the Disputation of Paris, starts between a Christian monk and four rabbis.
Year 1418
Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War: Parisians slaughter Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac and his suspected sympathizers, along with all prisoners, foreign bankers, and students and faculty of the College of Navarre.
Year 1429
Hundred Years' War: Joan of Arc leads the French army in their capture of the city and the English commander, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk in the second day of the Battle of Jargeau.
Year 1550
The city of Helsinki, Finland (belonging to Sweden at the time) is founded by King Gustav I of Sweden.
Year 1653
First Anglo-Dutch War: The Battle of the Gabbard begins and lasts until June 13.
Year 1665
England installs a municipal government in New York City (the former Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam).
Year 1758
French and Indian War: Siege of Louisbourg: James Wolfe's attack at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia commences.
Year 1772
French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne and 25 of his men killed by Māori in New Zealand
Year 1775
American Revolution: British general Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. The British offer a pardon to all colonists who lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to the amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured, were to be hanged.
Year 1864
American Civil War, Overland Campaign: Battle of Cold Harbor: Ulysses S. Grant gives the Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee a victory when he pulls his Union troops from their position at Cold Harbor, Virginia and moves south.
Year 1898
Philippine Declaration of Independence: General Emilio Aguinaldo declares the Philippines' independence from Spain.
Year 1899
New Richmond tornado: The eighth deadliest tornado in U.S. history kills 117 people and injures around 200.
Year 1914
Massacre of Phocaea: Turkish irregulars slaughter 50 to 100 Greeks and expel thousands of others in an ethnic cleansing operation in the Ottoman Empire.
Year 1939
Shooting begins on Paramount Pictures' Dr. Cyclops, the first horror film photographed in three-strip Technicolor.
Year 1940
World War II: Thirteen thousand British and French troops surrender to Major General Erwin Rommel at Saint-Valery-en-Caux.
Year 1943
Holocaust: Germany liquidates the Jewish Ghetto in Brzeżany, Poland (now Berezhany, Ukraine). Around 1,180 Jews are led to the city's old Jewish graveyard and shot.
Year 1944
American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division secure the town of Carentan.
Year 1954
Pope Pius XII canonises Dominic Savio, who was 14 years old at the time of his death, as a saint, making him at the time the youngest unmartyred saint in the Roman Catholic Church. In 2017 Jacinta and Francisco Marto, aged 10 and 9 at the time of their deaths, are declared saints.
Year 1963
NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith during the Civil Rights Movement.
Year 1964
Anti-apartheid activist and ANC leader Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison for sabotage in South Africa.
Year 1967
The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional.
Year 1979
Bryan Allen wins the second Kremer prize for a man powered flight across the English Channel in the Gossamer Albatross.
Year 1987
The Central African Republic's former Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa is sentenced to death for crimes he had committed during his 13-year rule.
Year 1987
Cold War: At the Brandenburg Gate U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.
Year 1990
Russia Day: The parliament of the Russian Federation formally declares its sovereignty.
Year 1991
1991 Kokkadichcholai massacre: The Sri Lankan Army massacres 152 minority Tamil civilians in the village of Kokkadichcholai near the eastern province town of Batticaloa.
Year 1993
An election takes place in Nigeria which is later annulled by the military Government led by Ibrahim Babangida.
Year 1994
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are murdered outside Simpson's home in Los Angeles. Her estranged husband, O.J. Simpson is later charged with the murders, but is acquitted by a jury.
Year 1999
Kosovo War: Operation Joint Guardian begins when a NATO-led United Nations peacekeeping force (KFor) enters the province of Kosovo in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Year 2009
A disputed presidential election in Iran leads to wide-ranging local and international protests.
Year 2016
Forty-nine civilians are killed and 58 others injured in an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; the gunman, Omar Mateen, is killed in a gunfight with police.