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Made for the 250thOn this day › June 22
What happened on June 22 in American history
June 22 is the 173rd day of the year (the 174th in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 14 stories from June 22 spanning 1774 to 2025. Among them: in 1774, Parliament triples Quebec's size and restores Catholic authority; colonists call it tyranny; and in 1807, HMS Leopard opens fire on USS Chesapeake; three Americans dead, four seized and taken to Halifax.
1774Member story · 1776 Club
Parliament triples Quebec's size and restores Catholic authority; colonists call it tyranny
The Quebec Act removes the Protestant oath blocking Canadiens from office, revives French civil law, and folds the Ohio Country into the province, enraging Patriots already seething over the Intolerable Acts.
1807Member story · 1776 Club
HMS Leopard opens fire on USS Chesapeake; three Americans dead, four seized and taken to Halifax
Commodore Barron refuses a British demand to search for deserters; Leopard fires on a ship whose guns are still unloaded, off the Virginia coast.
1813Member story · 1776 Club
Queenston woman walks 20 miles through the bush to warn FitzGibbon; Americans march into an ambush
Laura Secord slipped past American-occupied lines after overhearing officers in her own home outline plans for an attack on a British outpost along the Niagara frontier.
1839Member story · 1776 Club
Three Treaty of New Echota signers are killed on the same morning in Indian Territory
Coordinated ambushes strike Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot; Cherokee blood law holds that selling tribal land without authorization is a capital offense.
1870Member story · 1776 Club
Grant signs a real law department into being; the Attorney General can no longer moonlight to make ends meet
For 80 years the government's chief law officer ran a six-person office. The new Department of Justice centralizes all federal legal authority under one full-time hand.
1898Member story · 1776 Club
Six thousand troops wade ashore at Daiquirí; Spain watches and holds its fire
Linares commands nearly twice their number and does not fire a shot as Shafter's Fifth Corps scrambles through the surf sixteen miles east of Santiago.
1918Member story · 1776 Club
Troop train tears through sleeping circus cars near Hammond; 86 are dead, scores burning
Engineer Alonzo Sargent missed two automatic signals and a flagman before his locomotive hit the stalled Hagenbeck-Wallace train at 35 mph; oil lamps did the rest.
1942
Congress makes the Pledge of Allegiance official, fifty years after a magazine wrote it
The wording, unchanged from Bellamy's 1892 Columbus Day campaign, is now federal law, with the United States seven months into war.
1944
Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act; veterans to get mortgages, tuition, and a year's pay
Congress voted unanimously, sixteen days after D-Day, with the WWI bonus debacle and the 1932 Bonus Army march still fresh in every lawmaker's memory.
1945
Flag rises on Okinawa; Ushijima and his chief of staff are dead by their own hand
Eighty-two days of cave fighting, monsoon rain, and kamikaze attacks end with organized Japanese resistance broken and ninety miles of runway in Allied hands.
1969Member story · 1776 Club
Cleveland's Cuyahoga River burns again; this time, Mayor Stokes makes the city watch
An oil slick sparked by a passing rail car chars a railroad bridge for roughly $50,000 in damage, but Stokes walks reporters to the bank and the river that "oozes rather than flows" lands on the national front page.
1990Member story · 1776 Club
American soldiers haul away the Checkpoint Charlie guardhouse; the Cold War crossing is gone
The metal shed on Friedrichstraße, up since 1976, is bound for the Allied Museum, seven months after crowds tore into the Wall with pickaxes.
2009Member story · 1776 Club
Two Red Line trains collide near Fort Totten; nine are dead, more than 80 hurt
A moving train struck a stopped one at 44 mph, and investigators point to a track circuit that has been invisible to the automated control system since a replacement five days ago.
2025Member story · 1776 Club
B-2s drop 14 bunker busters on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan; USS Georgia fires Tomahawks in coordinated 30-minute strike
The IAEA chief says almost all sensitive equipment at Fordow is destroyed, though the Pentagon puts the setback to Iran's nuclear program at one to two years.
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