2008 - Esbjörn Svensson, Swedish jazz pianist (b. 1964)
Events
1381 - Richard II in England meets leaders of Peasants' Revolt on Blackheath. The Tower of London is stormed by rebels who enter without resistance.
1645 - English Civil War: Battle of Naseby – 12,000 Royalist forces are beaten by 15,000 Parliamentarian soldiers.
1648 - Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts colony.
1775 - American Revolutionary War: the Continental Army is established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the United States Army.
1777 - The Stars and Stripes is adopted by Congress as the Flag of the United States.
1789 - Mutiny on the Bounty: Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 7,400 km (4,000-mile) journey in an open boat.
1789 - Whisky distilled from maize is first produced by American clergyman the Rev Elijah Craig. It is named Bourbon because Rev Craig lived in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
1800 - The French Army of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in Northern Italy and re-conquers Italy.
1821 - Badi VII, king of Sennar, surrenders his throne and realm to Ismail Pasha, general of the Ottoman Empire, ending the existence of that Sudanese kingdom.
1822 - Charles Babbage proposes a difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables".
1839 - Henley Royal Regatta: the village of Henley, on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, stages its first Regatta.
1863 - American Civil War: Battle of Second Winchester – a Union garrison is defeated by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley town of Winchester, Virginia.
1951 - UNIVAC I is dedicated by U.S. Census Bureau.
1952 - The keel is laid for the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus.
1954 - U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill into law that places the words "under God" into the United States' Pledge of Allegiance.
1955 - Chile becomes a signatory to the Buenos Aires copyright treaty.
1959 - A group of Dominican exiles with leftist tendencies that departed from Cuba land in the Dominican Republic with the intent of deposing Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Save for four of them, all were killed and/or executed by Trujillo's army. This feat would be the inspiration for a clandestine group that would seek to continue undermining Trujillo's power and would be called "Movimiento Catorce de Junio" (14th of June Movement).
1962 - Albert DeSalvo, better known as the Boston Strangler, murders Anna Slesers, his first victim.
1962 - The European Space Research Organisation is established in Paris – later becoming the European Space Agency.
1962 - The New Mexico Supreme Court in the case of Montoya v. Bolack, 70 N.M. 196, prohibits state and local governments from denying Indians the right to vote because they live on a reservation.
1966 - The Vatican announces the abolition of the index librorum prohibitum (index of prohibited books), which was originally instituted in 1557.
1967 - Mariner program: Mariner 5 is launched toward Venus.
1976 - The trial begins at Oxford Crown Court of Donald Neilson, the killer known as the Black Panther.
1982 - The Falklands War ends: Argentine forces in the capital Stanley unconditionally surrender to British forces.
1985 - TWA Flight 847 is hijacked by Hezbollah shortly after take-off from Athens, Greece.
2001 - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan form the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
