1953: Elizabeth II crowned queen
On this day in 1953, 27-year-old Elizabeth II, the elder daughter of King George VI, was crowned queen of the United Kingdom at Westminster Abbey, having taken the throne upon her father’s death in February 1952.
1997: A jury in Denver, Colorado, found Timothy McVeigh of the militia movement guilty of murder and conspiracy in the deaths of 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and he was executed in June 2001.
1946: In the aftermath of World War II, the people of Italy passed a referendum to replace the governing monarchy with a republic.
1940: Constantine II, king of Greece from 1964 to 1974, was born in Psikhikó, near Athens.
1886: Frances Folsom, age 21, married U.S. President Grover Cleveland in the White House and became the youngest first lady in American history.
1865: Confederate soldiers yielded to Federal troops in Galveston, Texas, marking one of the final land operations of the American Civil War.
1840: English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, who set much of his work in Wessex, an imaginary county in southwestern England, was born.