📜 This Day in History

June 11

• 806Arab–Byzantine wars: The Abbasid army departed Raqqa in northern Syria to begin an invasion of Byzantine-controlled Asia Minor.
• 1724J. S. Bach led his cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, in Leipzig on the first Sunday after Trinity, beginning his chorale cantata cycle.
• 1847Prince Afonso died at the age of two, leaving his father Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, without a male heir.
• 1923Kitosh, an African labourer, died after having been flogged by his British employer, in a case that eventually led to reform of the legal system of the Kenya Colony.
• 2001Timothy McVeigh, detonator of a truck bomb in front of the Oklahoma federal building, was executed by lethal injection for using a weapon of mass destruction, among other charges.
• 2012Two earthquakes struck northern Afghanistan, triggering a massive landslide that buried a village and killed 75 people.

Born on this day

• 1864Richard Strauss, German composer and conductor (died 1949)
• 1899Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese novelist and short story writer Nobel Prize laureate (died 1972)
• 1910Jacques Cousteau, French biologist, author, and inventor, co-developed the aqua-lung (died 1997)
• 1933Gene Wilder, American actor, director, and screenwriter (died 2016)