Today in History: June 4, the Tiananmen Square Massacre

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Today in history:Also on this date:Today’s Birthdays:

Today is Wednesday, June 4, the 155th day of 2025. There are 210 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On June 4, 1989, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pro-democracy demonstrators and dozens of soldiers are estimated to have been killed when Chinese troops crushed a seven-week-long protest held by occupying demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Also on this date:

In 1812, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its first war declaration, approving by a vote of 79-49 a declaration of war against Britain.

In 1919, Congress approved the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which said that the right of Americans to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” (The amendment was then sent to the states for ratification.)

In 1940, during World War II, the Allied military completed the evacuation of more than 338,000 troops from Dunkirk, France.

Also in 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared in a speech to the House of Commons: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

In 1942, the World War II naval Battle of Midway began, which resulted in a decisive American victory against Japan and marked a turning point in the war in the Pacific.

In 1986, Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in Washington to conspiring to deliver national defense information to Israel. (Sentenced to life in prison, Pollard would be released on parole in November 2015.)

In 1990, Dr. Jack Kevorkian carried out his first publicly assisted suicide, helping Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer’s patient from Portland, Oregon, end her life in Oakland County, Michigan.

In 1998, a federal judge sentenced Terry Nichols to life in prison without parole for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people.