This Week: Accused witch hanged in first Salem trial, Mandela sentenced to life

More than 80 people were killed at Le Mans in France, motor racing’s worst disaster.

Celebrity chef author Anthony Bourdain passed away on June 8, 2018. (Photo by Rich Fury / AP Photo)

“This Week” looks back at the key events from this week in history.

June 8

A.D. 632: The prophet Muhammad died in Medina.

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1864, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for another term as president during the National Union (Republican) Party’s convention in Baltimore.

1867: Modern American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin.

1968: Authorities announced the capture in London of James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

2018: Celebrity chef, author and CNN host Anthony Bourdain was found dead in his hotel room in eastern France.

June 9

1692: Bridget Bishop was hanged in the first execution of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts.

1732: James Oglethorpe received a charter from Britain’s King George II to found the colony of Georgia.

1870: Author Charles Dickens died in Gad’s Hill Place, England.

1915: Guitarist, songwriter and inventor Les Paul was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

June 10

1935: Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in Akron, Ohio, by Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson.

1977: James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee with six others; he was recaptured three days later.

1983: Britain’s Conservatives, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, won a decisive election victory.

June 11

1509: England’s King Henry VIII married his first wife, Catherine of Aragon

1770: Captain James Cook, commander of the British Endeavour, “discovered” the Great Barrier Reef off Australia by running onto it.

1776: The Continental Congress formed a committee to draft a Declaration of Independence calling for freedom from Britain.

1955: More than 80 people were killed during the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, motor racing’s worst disaster.

1962: Three prisoners at Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay staged an escape, leaving the island on a makeshift raft; they were never found or heard from again.

June 12

1630: Englishman John Winthrop, leading a fleet carrying Puritan refugees, arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he became its governor.

1776: Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted a Declaration of Rights.

1942: Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.

1963: Civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

1964: Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison along with seven other people, including Walter Sisulu, for committing sabotage against the apartheid regime.

1987: President Ronald Reagan exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

1978: David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” .44-caliber killings that terrified New Yorkers.

1994: Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were killed outside her Los Angeles home.