From Byron's Best Slumber Party Ever to President Lincoln's "House Divided" speech, seven surprising facts from history happened on this date, June 16th.
- 1816 – "It was a dark and stormy night..." when poet and author Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati.Those guests? Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his young wife Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori. The tale and weather inspire Byron to challenge each guest (and himself) to write a ghost story.
- The result? Mary Shelley began what would become the novel Frankenstein, Byron penned the poem Darkness and John Polidori wrote the short story The Vampyre.
- 1858 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivers his now-famous House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois.
- 1897 – A treaty annexing the Republic of Hawaii to the United States is signed; the "Republic" would be dissolved a year later.
- 1903 – The Ford Motor Company is incorporated.
- 1911 – International Business Machines (IBM) is first founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York.
- 1977 – Oracle Corporation is incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL) by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates.
- 1981 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan awards the Congressional Gold Medal to Ken Taylor, Canada's former ambassador to Iran, for helping six Americans escape from Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979-81. Taylor is the first foreign citizen so honored. (His actions were memorialized in the award-winning movie, "Argo").
Images courtesy of Library of Congress and public domain.
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