On June 30, 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill protecting Yosemite Valley — establishing the unprecedented idea that a government could hold land for the people's permanent enjoyment.

On June 29, 2007, thousands camped outside Apple stores as the first iPhone went on sale — a device Steve Jobs had promised would "reinvent the phone."

Six days before independence was declared, a half-finished fort made of spongy palmetto logs stopped a British fleet cold — and bought the South four years of breathing room.

Two days after North Korea invaded the South, President Harry Truman made the call that would define American military intervention for generations: he ordered U.S. forces into combat without a declaration of war.

June 26, 1945: Two months after Roosevelt's death, fifty nations signed the UN Charter in San Francisco — the architecture of postwar order that he had envisioned but never lived to see.