Frederick I, nicknamed Barbarossa for his red beard, had led one of the largest armies ever assembled for a Crusade across Europe and Anatolia. Attempting to cross the swollen Saleph River (modern Göksu) in Cilicia, the elderly emperor was swept away and drowned, either from the current or a heart attack triggered by the cold water. His death shattered German morale, and most of his army turned back or disintegrated before reaching the Holy Land.
On Sunday, June 10 tradition marks a lesser echo of the earlier Pazzi conspiracy's aftermath, when Florentine authorities continued rounding up and executing conspirators tied to the plot against the Medici. The failed assassination, backed covertly by Pope Sixtus IV, had aimed to topple Lorenzo de' Medici's rule; instead it cemented his grip on Florence as the city rallied behind him.
Negotiated with papal blessing, the treaty drew an imaginary line roughly 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, granting Spain lands to the west and Portugal everything east — including, unknowingly, most of Brazil. The agreement shaped the linguistic and colonial map of the Americas for centuries, though it completely ignored the peoples already living there.
As the anti-foreign, anti-Christian Boxer movement swept northern China, roughly 2,000 troops from eight nations — Britain, the U.S., Japan, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary — advanced on Beijing to relieve besieged diplomats. The expedition stalled under fierce resistance and had to fight its way back to Tianjin, forcing the assembly of a much larger international force weeks later to finally break the siege.
Struggling alcoholics Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith met in Akron and forged a program of mutual support that would grow into Alcoholics Anonymous, formally tracing its founding to June 10, 1935 — the day Dr. Bob is said to have had his last drink. Their twelve-step approach, blending peer support with spiritual principles, became the model for addiction recovery programs worldwide, eventually reaching millions of members in over 180 countries.
From the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini told a Roman crowd that Italy was joining the war, timing his declaration to grab territory from an already-defeated France. The move, made when French resistance had nearly collapsed under the German blitzkrieg, drew derision even from some Axis officials for its opportunism, and stretched Italian forces into campaigns in North Africa and the Balkans that would prove disastrous.
In the days after the Battle of Midway, American commanders tallied the staggering results: four Japanese fleet carriers — Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu — sunk, versus the loss of USS Yorktown. The victory, made possible by codebreakers who had cracked Japan's JN-25 naval cipher, halted Japanese expansion in the Pacific and marked the war's decisive naval turning point just six months after Pearl Harbor.
Falsely linked to the assassination of Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, Lidice was surrounded before dawn. German police shot every male resident over fifteen — 173 men — against a farmyard wall, then burned the village to the ground. Women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp; most of the 105 children were gassed at Chełmno. The Nazis publicized the massacre as a warning, but it instead galvanized global outrage and Allied resolve.
Signed during Richard Nixon's Moscow summit, the agreement committed NASA and the Soviet space program to design compatible docking systems, enabling American and Soviet spacecraft to link up in orbit. Three years later, an Apollo capsule and a Soyuz craft docked 140 miles above Earth, and astronauts and cosmonauts shook hands through the open hatch — a symbolic thaw amid ongoing Cold War rivalry.
In a three-set battle at Roland Garros, unseeded teenager Arantxa Sánchez Vicario outlasted world No. 1 Steffi Graf 7-6, 6-2, 6-4, ending Graf's 32-match Grand Slam winning streak. The victory made Sánchez Vicario the first Spanish woman to win the French Open and signaled a changing of the guard in women's tennis.