building on Xedrik's idea of what happened on this date...

I'm hopelessly fascinated by the trivial.
The little nuggets that make me stop and go "wow"

On June 16th...

* 1816 – Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, and inspires his challenge that each guest write a ghost story, which culminated in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein.

* 1829 – Apache leader, Geronimo is born.

* 1858 – Abraham Lincoln delivers his House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois.

* 1890 – English actor, Stan Laurel is born.

* 1911 – IBM founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. On the same day a 772 gram stony meteorite strikes the earth near Kilbourn, Wisconsin damaging a barn.

* 1961 – Rudolf Nureyev defects from the Soviet Union.

* 1963 – Soviet Space Program: Vostok 6 Mission – Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.

* 1976 – Soweto uprising: a non-violent march by 15,000 students in Soweto, South Africa turns into days of rioting when police open fire on the crowd.