1381 – Richard II met leaders of the Peasants' Revolt on Blackheath.
1381 - The Tower of London was stormed by rebels who entered without resistance.
1645 – Battle of Naseby – 12,000 Royalist forces were beaten by 15,000 Parliamentarian soldiers.
1648 – Margaret Jones was hanged in Boston for witchcraft.
1777 – The Stars and Stripes was adopted by Congress as the Flag of the United States.
1789 – Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reached Timor after a nearly 7,400 km (4,000-mile) journey in an open boat.
1789 – Whisky distilled from corn was first produced by American clergyman the Rev Elijah Craig. He called it Bourbon because he lived in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
1822 – Charles Babbage proposed 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 – The village of Henley, on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, staged its first Regatta.
1907 – Norway adopted female suffrage.
1919 – John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown departed from St. John's, Newfoundland on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.
1927 – Jerome K. Jerome died.
1937 – The US House of Representatives passed the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.
1938 – Action Comics issue one was released, introducing Superman.
1940 – German troops entered Paris.
1940 – A group of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów became the first residents of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1942 – Anne Frank began to keep a diary.
1946 – John Logie Baird died.
1962 – The European Space Research Organisation was established in Paris – later becoming ESA (the European Space Agency).
1966 – The Vatican announced the abolition of the index librorum prohibitum (index of prohibited books), which was originally instituted in 1557.
1982 – The Falklands War ended.
1985 – TWA Flight 847 was hijacked by Hezbollah terrorists shortly after take-off from Athens, Greece.
1991 – Dame Peggy Ashcroft died.
2001 – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan formed the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation).