24th June

The events happened on 24th June are :



1812 : Napoleon and his Grand Army invaded Russia : Late in the spring of 1812, Napoleon and his Grand Army of about 600,000 men began the invasion of Russia, advancing rapidly as the Russian retreat separated the French from their supply bases. Napoleon thought that once Moscow was taken, Tsar Alexander I would capitulate. However, after the bloody Battle of Borodino, the French entered a largely deserted and ruined Moscow, and Alexander did not sue for peace. With the aid of heroic partisans, Russian Supreme Commander Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov then pursued Napoleon's force and drove it from the country.



1948 : The Berlin blockade intensified, and the Soviet Union announced that the Western Allied powers no longer had any rights in Berlin.



1932 : The Promoters Revolution, a bloodless coup, overthrew Prajadhipok, the king of Thailand, ending the absolute monarchy in that country and initiating the so-called Constitutional Era.



1859 : The Battle of Solferino, the last engagement of the Second War of Italian Independence, was fought in Lombardy.



1821 : South American patriots under Simón Bolívar defeated Spanish royalists on the plains near Caracas, Venezuela, in the Battle of Carabobo.



1795 : William Smellie, the Scottish compiler of the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, died in Edinburgh.



1497 : John Cabot became the first European to set foot in North America since the Vikings.



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