Today in History.....June 12

On this day in …

* 1665, England installed a municipal government in New York, formerly the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam

* 1776, Virginia's colonial legislature became the first to adopt a Bill of Rights

* 1838, the Iowa Territory was organized

* 1898, Philippine nationalists declared independence from Spain

* 1939, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, N.Y.

* 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was fatally shot in front of his home in Jackson, Miss.; he was 37. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)

* 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six "Son of Sam" .44-caliber killings that had terrified New Yorkers

* 1987, President Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, publicly challenged Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

* 1996, a panel of federal judges in Philadelphia blocked a law against indecency on the Internet, saying the 1996 Communications Decency Act would unlawfully chill adults' free-speech rights. ALSO:
Senate Republicans overwhelmingly chose Trent Lott to succeed Bob Dole as majority leader

* 2001, President Bush arrived in Madrid, Spain, on his first official trip to Europe. ALSO: A federal court in New York sentenced Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali, a Saudi Arabian practitioner of that "religion of peace", to life in prison without parole for his role in the deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya

* 2005, Vice PresidentDick Cheney, reacting to a growing chorus of calls to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, told Fox News Channel there were no plans to do so