June 2

Tubman guided Union gunboats carrying Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers up the Combahee. They burned plantations and carried off some 700 to 750 enslaved people to freedom in a single night.

On board a Union warship off Galveston, Edmund Kirby Smith signed the surrender of the Trans-Mississippi Department, whose terms his chief of staff had agreed in New Orleans a week earlier.

Before farmers, vets and journalists, Pasteur gave anthrax to vaccinated and unvaccinated sheep; on 2 June the vaccinated flock was healthy and the others dead or dying. His notebooks, read by Gerald Geison a century later, show the vaccine had been made with potassium dichromate, close to his…

His cousin twice over, their mothers sisters and their fathers cousins, divorced, with two daughters, Ilse and Margot. Before the wedding he had briefly considered marrying Ilse instead. Elsa ran the household, and his fame, for seventeen years.

The message reached London late on 1 June. The Times held it for the morning, and the day Elizabeth II was crowned the crowds waiting on the processional route heard that Everest had been climbed.

America’s first soft landing, four months after Luna 9, and proof that the lunar ground would hold up a lander. It sent back more than 11,000 pictures.

Europe’s first mission to another planet, launched on a Russian rocket. Its radar has seen what may be liquid water under the south polar ice, and more than two decades on it is still in orbit.