June 27 in History

A mob of two hundred men with blackened faces stormed a small jail in western Illinois and murdered the founder of one of America’s most enduring religions. On June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith Jr., the 38-year-old prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his brother Hyrum were shot and killed while being held at the Carthage Jail in Carthage, Illinois, on charges of inciting a riot and treason against the state. Smith had been the most controversial religious figure in America for fourteen years. Since publishing the Book of Mormon in 1830 and founding his church, he had gathered tens of thousands of followers, built and abandoned settlements in Ohio and Missouri, and established the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, as a thriving theocratic community of roughly 12,000 people. Smith served simultaneously as Nauvoo’s mayor, the commander of its militia (the Nauvoo Legion, the second-largest armed force in the country after the U.S. Army), and the church’s prophet, seer, and revelator. The immediate crisis began when Smith ordered the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper published by Mormon dissenters that exposed his practice of plural marriage. The destruction of the press outraged non-Mormons across Illinois and led to criminal charges. Smith surrendered to authorities at Carthage, reportedly telling followers he was going "like a lamb to the slaughter." Governor Thomas Ford had promised Smith’s safety, then left Carthage the morning of the attack. The assassins, members of local militias, were never convicted despite a well-publicized trial. Smith’s death created a succession crisis that split the movement into several factions. Brigham Young led the largest group westward to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, where they built the Mormon heartland that persists today. The church Smith founded now claims more than 17 million members worldwide, making his assassination one of the most consequential acts of religious violence in American history.

Joshua Slocum sailed into Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on June 27, 1898, completing a journey that every experienced mariner of his era considered suicidal. Over the course of three years, two months, and two days, the 54-year-old Nova Scotian had circumnavigated the globe alone aboard the Spray, a 36-foot oyster sloop he had rebuilt from a rotting hulk in a farmer’s field. Slocum departed Boston on April 24, 1895, with almost no money and equipment that professional sailors would have considered inadequate. The Spray had no engine, no modern navigation instruments beyond a cheap tin clock and a sextant, and no self-steering gear. Slocum navigated by dead reckoning and lunar observations, a method that had been obsolete for decades. He financed the voyage through lectures and book sales at ports along the way, often arriving nearly broke and leaving with just enough to reach the next stop. The voyage covered approximately 46,000 miles through some of the most dangerous waters on Earth. Slocum crossed the Atlantic twice, transited the Strait of Magellan through violent storms and encounters with hostile Fuegian natives who attempted to board the Spray at night, crossed the Pacific via Australia, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and recrossed the Atlantic to reach home. He was alone for months at a stretch, with his longest time without seeing land lasting 72 days during the Pacific crossing. Slocum published "Sailing Alone Around the World" in 1900, and the book became a classic of adventure literature that inspired generations of solo sailors. His achievement was not repeated for more than sixty years. Slocum himself was lost at sea in November 1909, departing Martha’s Vineyard aboard the Spray for a planned voyage to South America and never seen again. No wreckage was ever found.

A small nuclear reactor in a Soviet research town began feeding electricity into the power grid, and the atomic age acquired its most practical application. On June 27, 1954, the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, located roughly 60 miles southwest of Moscow, became the world’s first nuclear power station to generate electricity for civilian use, producing about five megawatts of electrical power, enough to supply a small town. The plant was built under the scientific direction of Igor Kurchatov, the physicist who had led the Soviet atomic bomb program, and designed by Nikolai Dollezhal. The reactor used a graphite-moderated, water-cooled design with enriched uranium fuel, a configuration that would become standard in Soviet nuclear engineering. The entire project was completed in roughly three years, driven by both scientific ambition and the Soviet leadership’s desire to demonstrate peaceful applications of nuclear technology alongside its military program. Obninsk’s output was tiny by later standards. The reactor’s thermal capacity of 30 megawatts yielded only five megawatts of electricity, enough to power perhaps 2,000 homes. But the achievement was conceptual rather than practical: it proved that nuclear fission could be harnessed for sustained, controlled electricity generation. The announcement was a propaganda victory for the Soviet Union, coming just a year after Stalin’s death and at a moment when both superpowers were competing to show that atomic energy could serve humanity rather than destroy it. The plant operated for 48 years, far exceeding its original design life, before being shut down on April 29, 2002. During its operational lifetime, it served primarily as a research facility, training nuclear engineers and testing fuel designs that informed the next generation of Soviet reactors. The graphite-moderated, water-cooled design pioneered at Obninsk was scaled up dramatically in subsequent decades, eventually producing the RBMK reactors, the same type that catastrophically failed at Chernobyl in 1986.

President Truman committed American military forces to combat in Korea without asking Congress for a declaration of war, establishing a precedent that would shape American foreign policy for the rest of the century. On June 27, 1950, two days after North Korea’s invasion of the South, Truman ordered U.S. air and naval forces to support South Korean troops and directed the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to prevent the conflict from spreading to China. The decision was made in a series of emergency meetings at Blair House, the president’s temporary residence while the White House was being renovated. Truman and his advisors, including Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, viewed the invasion as a test of American credibility. The lesson of the 1930s, when Western democracies failed to confront fascist aggression, dominated their thinking. Acheson argued that allowing South Korea to fall would embolden the Soviet Union to test Western resolve in Europe. Truman deliberately avoided requesting a declaration of war from Congress, calling the intervention a "police action" under United Nations authority. The UN Security Council had passed a resolution on June 25 urging member states to assist South Korea, with the Soviet Union absent from the vote due to its boycott over Chinese representation. Truman used this resolution as his legal basis, though constitutional scholars debated the president’s authority to commit troops without congressional approval. Ground forces followed on June 30, when Truman authorized General Douglas MacArthur to deploy Army units from Japan to Korea. The first American troops, Task Force Smith, engaged North Korean forces on July 5 and were quickly overrun, revealing how unprepared the occupation army in Japan was for combat. The Korean War would eventually draw in Chinese forces, kill more than 36,000 Americans, and establish the template for undeclared presidential wars that defined American military engagements from Vietnam through Afghanistan.

Police raided a Greenwich Village bar at 1:20 AM, and for the first time, the patrons fought back. On June 28, 1969, plainclothes officers from the New York City Police Department’s Public Morals Division entered the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street to enforce liquor licensing laws, beginning what they expected to be a routine shakedown. Instead, the bar’s patrons, many of them drag queens, transgender women, and homeless gay youth, resisted arrest and sparked six nights of protests that launched the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Police raids on gay bars were standard procedure in 1969. Homosexuality was illegal in every state except Illinois, and the New York State Liquor Authority routinely revoked licenses from bars known to serve gay customers. The Stonewall Inn was a Mafia-run establishment that paid off police for protection, making it one of the few places where gay men and transgender people could socialize openly. Even so, raids happened regularly, and patrons were typically arrested without resistance. Something broke that night. Accounts differ on exactly what triggered the eruption: some witnesses point to a woman in handcuffs who fought with officers and shouted at the crowd to act; others credit Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender woman, with throwing the first object. Within minutes, a crowd of several hundred surrounded the officers, who barricaded themselves inside the bar. Protesters threw bottles, bricks, and a parking meter used as a battering ram. The Tactical Patrol Force, New York’s riot police, arrived but could not disperse the crowd. Protests continued nightly through July 3, growing larger and more organized each evening. Within months, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance were founded, and the first Gay Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago on the first anniversary of the raid. Before Stonewall, roughly fifty gay rights organizations existed in the United States; within two years, there were more than four hundred.

King George II of Great Britain drew his sword and led his troops forward on horseback at the Battle of Dettingen on June 27, 1743, becoming the last British monarch to personally command an army in battle. The 59-year-old king’s horse bolted at the sound of cannon fire early in the engagement, nearly carrying him into French lines, before George dismounted and led his infantry on foot through a day of fierce fighting along the Main River in Bavaria. The battle arose from the War of the Austrian Succession, a continent-wide conflict triggered by Prussia’s seizure of Silesia from Austria in 1740. George II, who was also the Elector of Hanover, had personal territorial interests in the conflict and accompanied his army to the Continent despite the objections of his ministers. The combined British, Hanoverian, and Austrian force of roughly 37,000 men found itself trapped in a narrow defile near the village of Dettingen, hemmed in by the Main River and wooded hills, with a French army of 30,000 blocking their line of retreat. The French commander, the Duc de Gramont, abandoned his strong defensive position to attack, a decision that his superior, Marshal Noailles, had explicitly forbidden. The premature French advance allowed the Allied infantry to form battle lines and deliver devastating volleys. The fighting was particularly brutal along the riverbank, where French cavalry charges were repulsed with heavy losses. George’s personal presence steadied his troops during the most dangerous moments, though critics noted his horse had been running away when he dismounted. The Allied victory was tactically significant but strategically indecisive. France lost roughly 5,000 casualties to the Allies’ 3,000, and Gramont’s army retreated across the river. Handel composed his famous "Dettingen Te Deum" to celebrate the victory. George II’s battlefield command marked the end of an era in which European monarchs personally risked their lives in combat, a tradition stretching back millennia that ended on a muddy Bavarian riverbank.