June 18: George Orwell's "As One Non-Combatant to Another" was published on this day in 1943. Orwell's poem arguing against pacifism quotes from Churchill's "finest hour" speech, delivered to Parliament and the nation on this day in 1940 -- the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and just days after Nazi troops had marched into Paris.

June 17: The first college level standardized tests, forerunner to the modern SAT, were given on this day in 1901. Standardized testing is now present throughout education in America, as is the unabated debate over its fairness, efficacy, and attendant issues. Todd Farley’s Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry (2009) entertainingly argues that "the development and scoring of large-scale standardized tests is nothing but a theater of the absurd."

June 15: On this day in 1300, Dante was made one of the six Priors of Florence, the top political office in the city-state. Though only a two-month term -- the legal limit, so suspicious were the citizenry of corruption and power play -- Dante's appointment set in motion the series of events that would eventually cause his permanent banishment and inspire some of the most memorable lines in the Divine Comedy.

June 14: On this day in 1964, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters boarded their bus, "Further," for their first coast-to-coast trip. Novelist Robert Stone recalls some of the details in Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties: “Like everything that was essential to the sixties, the cross-country trip has been mythologized. If you can remember it, the old saw goes, you weren’t there….”

June 13: The New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers on this day in 1971. Though the leaked documents showed how four successive presidents had been duplicitous about American involvement in Vietnam, it was the current Nixon administration that made most of the headlines. On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment protected the Times; the ruling, the first of its kind by the Court, put new weight behind freedom of the press.

June 12: Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his Mississippi home 50 years ago today, aged thirty-seven. Although outspoken on racial issues since a teenager, Evers was murdered not for any high-profile provocation but for his devotion to grassroots change. A field secretary for the NAACP for the previous nine years, he was gunned down as he got out of his car after a sixteen-hour day, a bundle of "Jim Crow Must Go" T-shirts in his arms.

June 11: After dinner on this day in 1799, the Rev. Joseph Townsend, the Rev. Benjamin Richardson, and William Smith created the "Table of Strata" that would became The Map That Changed the World, and make "Strata Smith" the "Father of British Geology."

June 10: Maurice Sendak was born on this day in 1928. Sendak said that his children's books are addressed to "freaky kids who lick, sniff, and carry on over their books before they even read them." In his Caldecott acceptance, he referred to his desire to voice "this inescapable fact of childhood -- the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of All Wild Things."

June 8: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on this day in 1949. Shortly afterward, to point his theme and his lifelong commitment, Orwell issued a post-publication press release: "The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one:  Don't let it happen. It depends on you. "The quotation was soon given the status of a last statement or deathbed appeal, given that Orwell was hospitalized at the time and dead six months later.

June 7: On this day in 1977 Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus was published, and on this day in 1980 Henry Miller died. Based on her journal entries, and originally written as Nin's contribution to the dollar-a-page pornography that she, Miller, and others contracted to write for an anonymous client in the 1940s, Delta of Venus became Nin's first bestseller. Miller's Venus was a last "paramour and muse" and a former Playboy Playmate.

June 6: The Normandy D-Day invasion began on this day in 1944. The success of Operation Overlord depended heavily upon multiple layers of secrecy and surprise, each stage leading the expectant Germans ever further from the exact time and place of the Allied landings. Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross tells "The True Story of the D-Day Spies," a vital inner circle of double agents who "were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled."

June 5: O. Henry's death from alcoholism on this day in 1910 was the farthest thing from a surprise ending, but it came with some characteristic and now-legendary lines: "The train for happiness is late," and "Here I am going to die and only worth 23 cents," and, asking the hospital nurse to turn the light back on. "I don't want to go home in the dark."

June 4: The Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred on this day in 1989. The decades have not much clarified the original news reports that "hundreds, maybe thousands" of pro-democracy demonstrators were slaughtered, but anthologies that bring together the stories of witnesses  have given us an inside view of the events, these often expressed by "A Student Who Survived" or someone else well within range of a rifle or reprisal.

June 3: Joy left Mudville on this day in 1888, when Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" was first published in the San Francisco Examiner. Stephen Jay Gould’s Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, his personal testament to "A Lifelong Passion for Baseball," takes Sigmund Freud out to the ballgame -- specifically the final game of the 1955 World Series, in which Gould’s beloved Yankees lost to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

June 1: John Humphrey Noyes began the Oneida Community, one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and controversial utopian settlements, on this day in 1847. Noyes and his followers had practiced their beliefs -- most notoriously, in a free love form of "complex marriage" -- for years in Vermont; with the authorities about to lay charges of lewd behavior, it seemed timely to move to Oneida and "commence the testimony that the Kingdom of God has come."

May 31: Walt Whitman was born on this day in 1819, and on this day in 1889, his seventieth (and second-to-last) birthday, he was honored in a gala celebration. Though wheelchair-bound, he raised a glass or two as the speakers and the telegrams (from Tennyson, Twain, and many others) sang their songs of himself.

May 30: The first Indy 500 race was held on this day in 1911. The $40,000 prize money and the marathon challenge attracted the top drivers of the day, and a crowd estimated at upward of 80,000 came to witness, as the Indianapolis Sun newspaper put it on race day, the "Promise of Speed and Prospect of Blood."

May 29: Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest on this day in 1953. In his memoir High Adventure, Hillary says that the accomplishment of the historic feat -- a dozen other climbs over the previous thirty years had failed -- "seemed difficult at first to grasp"; recent books on Himalayan mountaineering lament that the feat is now all too common.

May 28: Walker Percy was born on this day in 1916. Percy's books are full of seekers, the theme clear and compulsive from the first pages of his first, prizewinning novel, The Moviegoer: "Then it is that the idea of the search occurs to me," says Binx Bolling. "What is the nature of the search? you ask.… The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life."

May 27: The Golden Gate Bridge opened on this day in 1937. The 4,200-foot span across San Francisco Bay, says Kevin Starr in Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge, "announced to the world something important about the American imagination." John Bateson's The Final Leap explores the dark side of the bridge's history, its reputation as the top suicide spot on earth.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later, / I still wanted to give up / friends, love, starry skies, / for a house where no one / was home, no one coming back, / and all I could drink."

May 24: Joseph Brodsky was born on this day in 1940 in Leningrad. Brodsky's constitutional skepticism was not compatible with the official Soviet alternatives, and by age twenty-five he was in prison, wrapped in cold, wet sheets as a cure for "having a worldview damaging to the state, decadence and modernism, failure to finish school, and social parasitism…except for the writing of awful poems."

May 23: Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow died on this day in 1934, gunned down in a police ambush on a road in the north Louisiana woods. The Barrow Gang's crime spree was short and small time, but the young "celebrity bandits" were involved in thirteen murders, and their brazen photographs (most famously, of Bonnie the "cigar-smoking gun moll") became newsreel footage around the world.

May 22: The video game Pac-Man, featuring "the most iconic character from the golden age of arcade video games," was released on this day in 1980. Over the next decade, gamers spent over $2.5 billion in quarters on Pac-Man, making it the highest-grossing arcade video game of all time. Pac-Man is now in the Smithsonian, and the game world, say some analysts, is on a hyper-drive collision course with reality.

May 21: The musical smash hit Gypsy opened on Broadway on this day in 1959. The bestseller upon which the show is based, Gypsy Rose Lee's memoir Gypsy, told her life as a rags-to-naked success story, and added to her case against H. L. Mencken, who had offered her profession a semantic makeover: "Ecdysiast, he calls me! Why, the man...has been reading books! Dictionaries! We don't wear feathers and molt them off.... What does he know about stripping?"

May 20: Blue jeans celebrate their unofficial 140th birthday today, the dry goods merchant Levi Strauss and the tailor Jacob Davis receiving a patent on May 20, 1873 for "a new article of manufacture, a pair of pantaloons having the pocket-openings secured at each edge by means of rivets." The denim historians track the fabric back to Nîmes, France (denim = de Nîmes); anthropologists ponder how the garment became so universal and "deeply semiotic."

May 18: Parade, the "first modern ballet," premiered in Paris on this day in 1917. The production was a collaboration of some of modernism's most famous -- music by Erik Satie, scenario by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Picasso, dancing by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company, and program notes by Guillaume Apollinaire, these describing the event as "a kind of surrealism," the first print usage of that word.

May 17: On this day in 1873 the innovative British novelist Dorothy Richardson was born. While Richardson may not be "the genius they forgot" (the subtitle of one biography), she was once compared to Proust and Joyce; her writing was the first to be described as "stream of consciousness"; and Virginia Woolf credited her with the invention of something that Woolf herself would go on to make famous -- "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender."

May 16: Studs Terkel was born on this day in 1912. Terkel's dozen books of oral history, compiled over a half century, are regarded as essential chronicles of this American life, especially as lived by the blue-collar class into which he was born. Terkel described himself as a "neo-Cartesian" -- one who believed not only "I tape, therefore I am" but "I tape, therefore they are."

May 15: The Eiffel Tower opened on this day in 1889. Built just a few years after New York had erected the Statue of Liberty (its internal structure also by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel), the tower was regarded by most at home as an opportunity for France to regain the world spotlight. But some thought the tower an outrage, one petition signed by Alexandre Dumas and others complaining that not even "the commercial nation of America" would want it.