History of the Day for:
June 26
- 1284: The Pied Piper lured 130 children of Hamelin away and they were never seen again. The reasons behind the mass-abduction is obscured by legend and the tale that he did it in revenge for not being paid for clearing the town of rats was a fiction added later.
- 1498: The toothbrush was invented.
- 1541: Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conqueror of Peru, was assassinated in his palace in Lima.
- 1721: Dr. Zabdiel Boylston gave the first smallpox inoculations in America.
- 1843: Hong Kong was proclaimed a British Crown Colony.
- 1870: The first part of the boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J. was opened.
- 1894: Karl Benz of Germany received a U.S. patent for a gasoline-driven automobile.
- 1896: The first movie theater in the U.S. opened, charging 10 cents for admission.
- 1904: Peter Lorre (born: Ladislav Loewenstein), actor in more than 80 films including "The Maltese Falcon," was born in Hungary.
- 1909: "Colonel" Tom Parker (born: Dries Van Kruijk), Elvis Presley's manager, was born in the Netherlands.
- 1914: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, two?time gold medalist in 1932 Olympics, 12-time winner major golf titles including three-time U.S. Open winner, helped found LPGA.
- 1924: The Ziegfeld Follies opened on Broadway.
- 1934: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Credit Union Act.
- 1945: The United Nations Charter was signed by 50 nations in San Francisco, succeeding the League of Nations.
- 1959: The St. Lawrence Seaway, connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic, was opened by Queen Elizabeth II and President Eisenhower.
- 1977: Elvis Presley made his final concert performance at Indianapolis; he died two months later.
- 1989: The Supreme Court ruled murderers as young as 16 or who were mentally retarded could be sentenced to death.
- 1991: A Kentucky medical examiner said tests proved President Zachary Taylor died in 1850 of natural causes, not from arsenic poisoning.
- 1991: Ten-Day War: the Yugoslav people's army begins the Ten-Day War in Slovenia.
- 1993: The United States launches a missile attack targeting Baghdad intelligence headquarters in retaliation for a thwarted assassination attempt against former President George H.W. Bush in April in Kuwait.
- 1994: Microsoft no longer supports MS-DOS and the development of FreeDOS begins.
- 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.
- 2008: The U.S. Supreme Court rules in District of Columbia v. Heller that the ban on handguns in the District of Columbia is unconstitutional.