June 10 · This Day in America
The HMS Gaspee is a British revenue schooner, and the colonists of Narragansett Bay have come to hate it — stopping their boats, seizing their cargo, treating smuggling and survival as the same crime. On the afternoon of the ninth it runs aground chasing a packet sloop near Warwick. Word spreads through Providence taverns by nightfall. Around fifty men in longboats, led by the merchant John Brown, slip out across the dark water in the small hours of the tenth, board the stranded ship, wound its commander, put the crew ashore, and set the Gaspee ablaze. The flames are visible for miles. London is furious; a royal commission is convened to ship the culprits to England for trial — and no one will name a single name. Three years before Lexington, ordinary Rhode Islanders had already decided some authority could simply be refused.
Source: www.history.navy.mil
Also on this day · 1944
With ballplayers gone to war, the Reds sign a high-school sophomore named Joe Nuxhall. On this day he pitches two-thirds of an inning against the Cardinals — at 15 years and 316 days, still the youngest person ever to play a Major League game. He gives up five runs and goes home to finish tenth grade. Eight years later he's back in the majors for real, and stays a Red, in the booth, for half a century.
Source: www.history.com