June 1

“He was like the best of fathers to me,” Melzi wrote from Amboise, adding that everyone grieved for a man “whose like nature cannot produce again”.

He died at Sunpu, aged 73. The court deified him as Tōshō Daigongen, and he was enshrined at Nikkō, where his grandson Iemitsu later built the gilded Tōshōgū. Japanese calendar: Genna 2, 4th month, 17th day

Joseph Johnston was badly wounded at Seven Pines, and Davis gave his army to his military adviser. Lee renamed it the Army of Northern Virginia and led it for the rest of the war.

The East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act of 1873 let the government buy out the stock, and on 1 June 1874 the Company was dissolved, 273 years after its charter. Its archives passed to the India Office and are now in the British Library.

About 250 ships: the only clash of the two battle fleets. The British lost 14 ships and more than 6,000 men, the Germans 11 ships and about 2,500 men, but the German fleet never again risked a full battle and the blockade held.

German soldiers captured at Tsingtao gave the first complete performance of the Ninth in Japan, with an all-male choir of prisoners, at the Bandō camp, whose commandant let them run orchestras and workshops. Japan now hears the Ninth hundreds of times every December.

Played under the military junta that took power in 1976. The commission that investigated after its fall documented nearly 9,000 people who were disappeared; human-rights groups put the number near 30,000. The navy’s ESMA detention centre stood about a kilometre from the stadium that held the final.

Aeroflot flew the Tu-144 weekly between Moscow and Alma-Ata, 55 passenger flights in all. After a development aircraft crashed in May 1978, the service stopped for good.

Promulgated this day after the Diet passed it in May; in force from 1 April 1986. Japan needed it to ratify CEDAW, which it did that June. It asked employers only to “endeavour” to treat women equally in hiring and promotion. Many firms answered with two tracks, a career track mostly for men and a…

Shawn Fanning's file-sharing service let anyone download songs straight from other users' hard drives. It had tens of millions of users before the courts shut it down in 2001, and the music industry spent the next fifteen years rebuilding around the internet.

OV-105, built from spare parts to replace Challenger. Schoolchildren chose the name, after Captain Cook’s ship, hence the British spelling. In 25 missions it fixed Hubble, began the International Space Station and delivered its Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.