On this date in history:

In 1888, the comic baseball poem Casey at the Bat was published in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Examiner.

In 1937, the duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, married divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson of Baltimore after abdicating the British throne.

In 1942, the battle of Midway began. (It raged for four days and was the turning point for the United States in the World War II Pacific campaign against Japan.)

In 1965, Gemini IV astronaut Ed White made the first American walk in space. White, attached to a 25-foot cord, was outside the spacecraft for 23 minutes. (He later said the order to end his spacewalk was the saddest moment of his life.)

In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic revolution, died.

In 1997, French Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin became prime minister.

In 2004, CIA Director George Tenet resigned.

In 2008, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois clinched the Democratic presidential nomination on the final day of the party's primary season.

In 2009, New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch signed legislation allowing same-sex marriage, effective January 2010.

In 2011, Jack Kevorkian, 83, the Michigan physician known as Dr. Death, died. His advocacy for assisted suicide created havoc for medical ethicists and law agencies.

In 2012, a Dana Air jetliner crashed into a two-story apartment building in a densely populated suburb of Lagos, Nigeria, killing 153 people on the plane and 10 on the ground.

In 2013, U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., World War II veteran and oldest member of the Senate, died of viral pneumonia at age 89.

In 2014, Bashar al-Assad, Syria's president, was given another seven-year term in an election ignored and scorned by the opposition in the war-torn country.

Copyright 2015 by United Press International