June 21 - Events

Events

• 217 BC – The Romans, led by Gaius Flaminius, are ambushed and defeated by Hannibal at the Battle of Lake Trasimene.
• 533 – A Byzantine expeditionary fleet under Belisarius sails from Constantinople to attack the Vandals in Africa, via Greece and Sicily.
• 1307 – Külüg Khan is enthroned as Khagan of the Mongols and Wuzong of the Yuan.
• 1529 – French forces are driven out of northern Italy by Spain at the Battle of Landriano during the War of the League of Cognac.
• 1582 – Japanese daimyo Oda Nobunaga is forced to commit suicide in Honnō-ji, Kyoto.
• 1621 – Execution of 27 Czech noblemen on the Old Town Square in Prague as a consequence of the Battle of White Mountain.
• 1734 – In Montreal in New France, a slave known by the French name of Marie-Joseph Angélique is put to death, having been convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of the city.
• 1749 – Halifax, Nova Scotia, is founded.
• 1768 – James Otis, Jr. offends the King and Parliament in a speech to the Massachusetts General Court.
• 1788 – New Hampshire ratifies the Constitution of the United States and is admitted as the 9th state in the United States.
• 1791 – King Louis XVI of France and his immediate family begin the Flight to Varennes during the French Revolution.
• 1798 – Irish Rebellion of 1798: The British Army defeats Irish rebels at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.
• 1813 – Peninsular War: Battle of Vitoria.
• 1824 – Greek War of Independence: Egyptian forces capture Psara in the Aegean Sea.
• 1826 – Maniots defeat Egyptians under Ibrahim Pasha in the Battle of Vergas.
• 1848 – In the Wallachian Revolution, Ion Heliade Rădulescu and Christian Tell issue the Proclamation of Islaz and create a new republican government.
• 1854 – The first Victoria Cross is awarded during the bombardment of Bomarsund in the Åland Islands.
• 1864 – American Civil War: The Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road begins.
• 1864 – New Zealand Land Wars: The Tauranga Campaign ends.
• 1877 – The Molly Maguires, ten Irish immigrants convicted of murder, are hanged at the Schuylkill County and Carbon County, Pennsylvania prisons.
• 1898 – The United States captures Guam from Spain.
• 1900 – Boxer Rebellion. China formally declared war on the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan, as an edict issued from the Dowager Empress Cixi.
• 1900 – Baron Eduard Toll, leader of the Russian Polar Expedition of 1900, departed Saint Petersburg in Russia on the explorer ship Zarya, never to return.
• 1915 – The U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision in Guinn v. United States 238 US 347 1915, striking down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens.
• 1919 – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police fire a volley into a crowd of unemployed war veterans, killing two, during the Winnipeg General Strike.
• 1919 – Admiral Ludwig von Reuter scuttles the German fleet in Scapa Flow, Orkney. The nine sailors killed are the last casualties of World War I.
• 1929 – An agreement brokered by U.S. Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow ends the Cristero War in Mexico.
• 1930 – One-year conscription comes into force in France.
• 1940 – The first successful west-to-east navigation of Northwest Passage begins at Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
• 1942 – World War II: Tobruk falls to Italian and German forces.
• 1942 – World War II: A Japanese submarine surfaces near the Columbia River in Oregon, firing 17 shells at nearby Fort Stevens in one of only a handful of attacks by the Japanese against the United States mainland.
• 1945 – World War II: The Battle of Okinawa ends when the organized resistance of Imperial Japanese Army forces collapses in the Mabuni area on the southern tip of the main island.
• 1948 – Columbia Records introduces the long-playing record album in a public demonstration at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, New York.
• 1952 – The Philippine School of Commerce, through a republic act, is converted to Philippine College of Commerce, later to be the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
• 1957 – Ellen Fairclough is sworn in as Canada's first woman Cabinet Minister.
• 1963 – Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini is elected as Pope Paul VI.
• 1964 – Three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, are murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, United States, by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
• 1970 – Penn Central declares Section 77 bankruptcy, largest ever US corporate bankruptcy up to this date.
• 1973 – In handing down the decision in Miller v. California 413 US 15, the Supreme Court of the United States establishes the Miller Test for obscenity in U.S. law.
• 1977 – Bülent Ecevit, of CHP forms the new government of Turkey.
• 1982 – John Hinckley is found not guilty by reason of insanity for the attempted assassination of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
• 2000 – Section 28 (of the Local Government Act 1988), outlawing the 'promotion' of homosexuality in the United Kingdom, is repealed in Scotland with a 99 to 17 vote.
• 2001 – A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicts 13 Saudis and a Lebanese in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen.
• 2004 – SpaceShipOne becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight.
• 2006 – Pluto's newly discovered moons are officially named Nix & Hydra.
• 2009 – Greenland assumes self-rule.
• 2012 – A boat carrying more than 200 refugees capsized in the Indian Ocean between the Indonesian island of Java and Christmas Island, killing 17 people and leaving 70 other missing,