1718 Gansu earthquake occurred on June 19, 1718 in Qing Empire (now China), there were an estimated 73,000 deaths.

On 19 June, Tsar Alexander sent an envoy to seek an armistice with Napoleon. The latter assured the envoy that the Vistula River represented the natural borders between French and Russian influence in Europe. On that basis, the two emperors began peace negotiations at the town of Tilsit after meeting on an iconic raft on the River Niemen. The very first thing Alexander said to Napoleon was probably well-calibrated: "I hate the English as much as you do".

Formerly enslaved people in Galveston celebrated after the announcement. Freedmen in Texas organized the first of what became the annual celebration of "Jubilee Day" on June 19. Early celebrations were used as political rallies to give voting instructions to newly freed slaves. Early independence celebrations often occurred on January 1 or 4.

On June 19, 1910, a Father's Day celebration was held at the YMCA in Spokane, Washington, by Sonora Smart Dodd. Her father, the civil war veteran William Jackson Smart, was a single parent who raised his six children there. She was also a member of Old Centenary Presbyterian Church (now Knox Presbyterian Church), where she first proposed the idea. After hearing a sermon about Jarvis' Mother's Day in 1909 at Central Methodist Episcopal Church, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday to honor them. Although she initially suggested June 5, her father's birthday, the pastors did not have enough time to prepare their sermons, and the celebration was deferred to the third Sunday in June. Several local clergymen accepted the idea, and on June 19, 1910, the first Father's Day, "sermons honoring fathers were presented throughout the city".

Kennedy lived in Brookline for the first ten years of his life and attended the local St. Aidan's Church, where he was baptized on June 19, 1917.