Browse Historical Events by Day: What Happened on June 19th?

Union General Gordon Granger announces in Galveston, Texas, that all slaves in Texas are free, an event, now celebrated as "Juneteenth". More

Maximilian was executed on a hill outside Querétaro, bringing an end to France's short lived Mexican empire. More

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electrocution at Sing Sing Prison in New York. They had been found guilty of providing vital information on the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. More

Construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault begins. The secure facility is built into the side of a mountain on Spitsbergen, the largest of the Svalbard islands, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The vault is intended to safeguard the seeds of the world’s food plants in the event of a global crisis. The vault was formally open with its first consignment of seeds on February 26, 2008. More