01010620 This Day In History, June 20

451: The Battle of Chalons. The Romans under Flavius Aetius fought the forces of Attila the Hun (see also A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars, A History Of Jerusalem: Titus And The Zealots, A History Of Jerusalem: Hadrian and Simon bar Kokhba and A History Of Jerusalem: Constantine and Muhammad). At its greatest extent, the Hunnic Empire covered the lands from the Ural River (in Russia) in the east to the Rhine River (in Germany) in the west, and from the Danube River (in Germany) in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north.

1214: The University of Oxford received its charter.

1397: The Union of Kalmar united Denmark, Sweden, and Norway under one monarch.

1529: Clement VII and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (see The Holy Roman Empire) signed the Peace of Barcelona; it ended attacks on Rome by the Lutheran armies.

1567: Jews were expelled from Brazil by order of regent Don Henrique.

1624: France and the Netherlands signed a treaty of non-aggression at Compiegne.

1631: The Irish village of Baltimore was sacked by Algerian pirates.

1756: 146 British soldiers in India were captured and imprisoned in a suffocating cell reserved for petty offenders. 120 of them died in what became known as the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta."

1837: King William IV of England died. He was succeeded by his 18 year old niece, Queen Victoria, who remained on the throne for 63 years.

1840: Samuel Morse received a patent for his "telegraph."

1877: Alexander Graham Bell installed the world's first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Bell lived for many years at the nearby city of Brantford, Ontario where the Bell Homestead is today a popular tourist attraction. According to Bell's own recorded testimony, he invented the telephone at his home in Brantford.

1923: Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary leader, was assassinated.

1942: A Japanese submarine shelled Estevan Point, British Columbia, one of the very few direct attacks on North America during the Second World War.

1946: Fred Rose, the only member of the communist party elected to the Canadian Parliament, was sentenced to six years in prison for conspiring to communicate wartime secrets to the USSR. He was exposed as a traitor by Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, who had defected to Canada.

1955: The longest solar eclipse in the 20th century, 7 minutes and 8 seconds. The maximum possible is 7 minutes and 31 seconds.

1963: The U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed to establish a "hot line" between Washington and Moscow.

1972: President Richard Nixon's famous "Watergate" meeting with H.R. Haldeman where 18 minutes of tape were later mysteriously erased.

1979: ABC News (U.S.) correspondent Bill Stewart was shot dead by a Nicaraguan soldier; the murder was recorded and shown around the world, adding to the fall of the CIA-backed regime of the dictator Anastasio Somoza.

1992: Czech and Slovak leaders agreed to split Czechoslovakia into 2 separate countries. It had been formed in 1918 after the First World War caused the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.