Today in history — June 21

1774: Lawyer Daniel D. Tompkins is born at Scarsdale, New York.  While serving as U.S. Vice President under James Monroe, he’ll lead a private venture that inaugurates steam ferry service between Manhattan and Staten Island.

1788: New Hampshire ratifies the new Constitution and becomes the ninth U.S. state.

1871: Four members of the Irish-American labor group the “Molly Maguires” are hanged at Carbon County, Pennsylvania, for the murder of two mine bosses.

1898: Guam becomes a U.S. territory.

1903: Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who will prove you can earn a nice living doing drawings where everyone’s forehead is way too big, is born at St. Louis, Missouri,

1905: Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre is born at Paris, France, a cousin of Albert Schweitzer.

1927: Carl Burton Stokes (Cleveland-Marshall Law 1956), whose victory in Cleveland in 1967 will make him the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, is born at Cleveland, Ohio.

1942: A Japanese submarine lobs 17 shells into Fort Stevens at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon. They cause no damage.

1947: Harold Dahl, in a boat with his son and a dog, encounters six UFOs at Maury Island, Washington. The aliens kill his dog, but the government manages to hush things up.

1957: Progressive Conservative Ellen Louks Fairclough becomes the first woman to hold a Canadian cabinet post when she is sworn in as Secretary of State for Canada.

1965: Roger McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker guitar becomes one of the distinctive sounds of the Sixties as the Byrds release the album Mr. Tambourine Man.

2003: J.K. Rowling’s 900-page Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth in the projected series, is published. It sells seven million copies the first day, and as of today, two years alter, it’s still the top-selling book on Amazon.com.