June 24. 1986: Seven women are arrested in Rochester, New York for conducting a topless picnic to protest local laws which allowed men, but not women, to be shirtless in public. 1994: After years of refusal, U.S. finally ratifies International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

June 25. 1825: Capture of Bob Forbes, leader of Maroons (blacks resisting slavery) in Virginia. 1876: Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapahoe defeat Gen. Custer's troops at Little Big Horn, Montana. 1938: Fair Labor Standards Act passed. 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. 1541: Pizarro, decimator of the Inca empire, assassinated in Peru. Too little, too late. 1970: Riots erupt in Northern Ireland after British courts jail Bernadette Devlin, Member of Parliament, for fomenting unrest. 1975: FBI- initiated shootout at Oglala, South Dakota, kills two FBI agents and Lakota activist Joe Stuntz. Two American Indian Movement leaders are prosecuted for the FBI deaths and found innocent by reason of self-defense; a third, Leonard Peltier, is later tried and convicted. 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. 1905: Industrial Workers of the World, radical union, founded in Chicago. 1986: World Court rules U.S. support for Nicaraguan "contras" violates international law. 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 U.S. 1994: Department of Energy discloses that hundreds of U.S. citizens were unwittingly used for radiation experiments during the Cold War.

June 29. 1895: 7,000 Doukhobors stage mass weapons-burning, Trans-Caucasia, Russian Empire. 1917: W.E.B. DuBois leads silent march by blacks against lynching, New York City. 1972: U.S. Supreme Court declares all current state death penalty laws unconstitutional. A later ruling allows states to rewrite laws to reinstitute capital punishment in 1976.

June 30. 1852: Duwamish tribe awarded $62,000 for the taking of their aboriginal lands, including the present-day site of the city of Seattle. 1969: Seattle City Council approves a plan to purchase Kiker Island, off Deception Pass (Whidbey Island), as a site for a future nuclear power plant. 1980: U.S. Supreme Court upholds $122 million judgment to the Lakota (Sioux) Nation for illegal taking of Black Hills, South Dakota.