June 19. 1953: Despite widespread international protest and compelling evidence of their innocence, US government executes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies.

June 20. 1947: Taft-Hartley Labor Act, curbing strikes, is vetoed by President Truman. Congress overrode the veto.

June 21. 1877: On "Pennsylvania's Day With the Rope," eleven "Molly Maguire" coal miners are hanged by the state for the crime of attempting to organize workers. 1997: 100,000 march in solidarity with striking newspaper workers in Detroit.

June 22. 1987: 10,000 protesters form a 10-mile-long human chain around US airbase, Okinawa.

June 23. 1970: On the eleventh day of protests against a new US-Japan defense treaty, more than 750,000 Japanese take to the streets in numerous cities.

June 24. 1647: Margaret Brent urges women's vote before Maryland Assembly. She is ejected. 1848: Birth of Albert Parsons. Radical American editor, printer. One of the anarchists unjustly accused and executed for the Haymarket bombing in Chicago.

June 25. 1978: In response to the passage of an anti-gay ordinance in Miami, 240,000 people march in San Francisco in the first large-scale version of that city's annual Gay Freedom Day Parade.

June 26. 1994: In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, over one million people march in New York City to celebrate and demand gay and lesbian rights.

June 27. 1995: Two Operation Homestead activists are arrested in downtown Seattle for occupying the rooftop of a low-income housing building, the Payne Apartments, slated for demolition to make way for a parking lot. They are later acquitted of charges.

June 28. 1969: Stonewall Rebellion in New York City--a riot of drag queens enraged by yet another evening of casual police brutality--marks birth of modern gay rights movement in US.

June 29. 1940: Alien Registration (Smith) Act enacted, requiring all aliens to register at post offices, be fingerprinted, and report annually to the US government. The INS Efficiency Act of December 1981 repealed these requirements; however, Attorney General John Ashcroft unilaterally announced a new program of alien registration in June 2002. A provision buried within the 1940 law, referred to as the Smith Act, allows the US government to prosecute anyone suspected of advocating violent overthrow of the government; it was used to try and imprison Socialist Workers Party members in the 1940s and US Communist Party members in the 1950s.

June 30. 1952: Congress passes McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, to screen out "subversive" aliens and deport them, even if they have become US citizens. Follows up on the McCarran Act (Internal Security Act of 1950)--one of the more bucolic provisions being its authorization of concentration camps "for emergency situations." 1974: Martin Luther King's 69-year-old mother is shot and killed as she plays the organ in Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church.

July 1. 1922: One million railway shopmen strike. 1983: Copper miners begin a long, bitter strike against Phelps-Dodge in Clifton, AZ, in which then-Governor Bruce Babbitt repeatedly deployed state police and National Guardsmen to assist the company.

July 2. 1777: Vermont becomes first state in what would become US to abolish slavery.