History of the Day for:
June 21
- 1633: The Inquisition forced Galileo to renounce his Copernican heliocentric ideas.
- 1684: King Charles II revoked the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter.
- 1788: The U.S. Constitution went into effect and New Hampshire was admitted to the Union as the ninth state.
- 1834: Cyrus Hall McCormick patented his reaping machine.
- 1868: Richard Wagner's opera, "Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg," was first performed in Munich.
- 1879: F.W. Woolworth opened the first 5 & 10 cent store.
- 1905: Jean-Paul Sartre, famous French philosopher, was born.
- 1907: E. W. Scripps founded United Press.
- 1919: The captured German fleet based at Scapa Flow in Scotland scuttled itself to the surprise of the British who were guarding it. More than 70 vessels were sunk on the orders of Admiral von Reuter.
- 1942: Tobruk fell to the German army under Field Marshal Erwin von Rommel with 25,000 prisoners taken.
- 1945: The Battle of Okinawa ended.
- 1964: Three civil rights workers, Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney, disappeared in Philadelphia, Miss. while registering black voters.
- 1982: John Hinckley was found not guilty of the 1981 attempted murder of President Reagan by reason of insanity.
- 1989: The Supreme Court ruled burning the American flag as a political protest was protected under the First Amendment.
- 1999: Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad starts his work in Perdana Putra, Putrajaya.
- 2000: Section 28 (outlawing the 'promotion' of homosexuality in the United Kingdom) is repealed in Scotland with a 99 to 17 vote.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.