June 22, when the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity was founded at Yale, (1844), when Congress created the Department of Justice (1870), when FDR signed into law the G.I. Bill (1944), when Nixon signed a measure lowering the voting age to 18 (1970), when Checkpoint Charlie was dismantled in Berlin (1990), when Eastman Kodak Company announced the discontinuation of all Kodachrome Color film, (2009), and most importantly, when Jon and Kate (+8) announced plan to divorce (2009). It’s Louisiana’s own chess master Paul Morphy’s birthday (1837), along with Meryl Streep (1949), Cyndi Lauper (1953), and Erin Brockovich (1960), while the voice of Judy Garland (1969), the moves of Fred Astaire (1987) and the jokes of George Carlin (2008) came to an end. So do what one should on the 173rd day of the year: 

June 20, when Atilla the Hun retreated from Flavius Aetius during the Battle of Chalons, causing a Roman victory (451), when Samuel Morse patented the telegraph (1840), when West Virginia was admitted as the 35th United State of America (1863), when Alexander Graham Bell installed the world’s first telephone service, in Canada (1877), when the Mali and Senegal received independence from France (1960), when Jaws was released (1975), when the Asteroid Eureka was discovered (1990), and when Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the family bathtub in Houston, TX (2001). Lillian Hellman (1905) and John Goodman (1952) share this birthday, and American business mogul Howard Johnson left us this day (1972); It’s Argentina’s Day of the National Flag, Eritrea’s Martyrs’ Day (yes, that is a real country), and both International Refugee and Surfing Day. So hang ten:

June 19, when English colonists left Roanoke Island after a failed attempt to establish England’s first permanent settlement in America (1586), when the first organized baseball match was played in Hoboken, NJ’s Elysian Fields (1846), when Congress prohibited slavery in the U.S., nullifying the Dred Scott Case (1862), when Confederate States were formally readmitted to the U.S. (1870), when Father’s Day was first celebrated in Spokane, Washington (1910), when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was finally approved after surviving an 830day filibuster in the Senate (1964), and when Garfield appeared in his first comic strip (1978). It’s when Salman Rushdie (1947) and Paula Abdul (1962) were born, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed (1953), and Juneteenth (day), a national holiday honoring African American Heritage by commemorating the announcement of the complete abolition of slavery in 1865. Speaking of holidays, Happy Father’s Day:

June 17th, when Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I’s wife died during childbirth, leaving him to spend the next seventeen years building her mausoleum, aka the Taj Mahal (1631), when French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reached the Mississippi and were the first to make a detailed account of the river’s course (1673), the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Bunker Hill (1775), when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against allowing the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer in public schools in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), when Nixon  declared the (joke of a) War on Drugs (1971), when five operatives were arrested for something called, um, Watergate (1972), and when O.J. Simpson was arrested for the alleged murdering of his wife and her friend Ronald Goldman (1994)