What happened on June 14 ?

1381 - King Richard II of England meets the leaders of Peasants' Revolt.

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 United States Army is established by the Continental Congress.

1777 - Stars and Stripes adopted by Congress as the Flag of the United States.

1789 - Mutiny on the Bounty: HMAV Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 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 - Napoleon Bonaparte's French Army defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in Northern Italy and re-conquers Italy.

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.

1846 - Bear Flag Revolt begins - Anglo settlers in Sonoma, California, start a rebellion against Mexico and proclaim the California Republic.

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.

1872 - Trade unions are legalised in Canada.

1900 - Hawaii becomes a United States territory.

1900 - The Reichstag approves a second law that allows the expansion of the German navy.

1905 - Battleship Potemkin uprising: Sailors start a mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin, denouncing the crimes of autocracy, demanding liberty and an end to war. (See also Eisenstein's classic film on the subject, The Battleship Potemkin).

1907 - Norway adopts female suffrage.

1908 - Fourth German Navy Bill is passed authorising the financing the building of another four major warships.

1919 - John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown depart St. John's, Newfoundland on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.

1937 - Pennsylvania becomes the first (and only) state of the United States to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday.

1938 - Action Comics issues the first Superman comic.

1940 - World War II: Paris falls under German occupation.

1940 - World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Naval Expansion Act into law which aims to increase the United States Navy's tonnage by 11%.

1940 - A group of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów become the first residents of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

1941 - Soviet mass deportations and murder of Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians begun.

1942 - Anne Frank begins to keep a diary.

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" to 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 which departed from Cuba landed in the Dominican Republic with the intent of deposing Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina's dicatorial regime. 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 - Anna Slesersby becomes the first victim of Albert DeSalvo, better known as the Boston Strangler.

1962 - The European Space Research Organisation is established in Paris ? later becoming the European Space Agency.

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.

1967 - The People's Republic of China tests its first hydrogen bomb.

1970 - Manchester United footballer Bobby Charlton plays his 106th and last international match for England v West Germany in the World Cup finals in Mexico. His first game had been in April 1958 against Scotland.

1976 - The trial begins at Oxford Crown Court of Donald Neilson, the killer known as the Black Panther.

1976 - The Gong Show debuts on NBC.

1982 - Falklands War ends: Argentine forces in the capital Stanley unconditionally surrender to British forces.

1985 - TWA Flight 847 is hijacked by Hezbollah.

1991 - Marshall Ledbetter occupies the Florida State Capitol.

1993 - A weeklong product tampering scare, later proven to be a hoax, occurs as customers throughout the USA discover syringes in unopened cans of Diet Pepsi Cola.

2002 - Twelve are killed and 50 injured by a car bomb explosion in front of the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.

2004 - The Workers Party of Bangladesh is split, as Khandaker Ali Abbas leaves to form a new party.

2005 - Asafa Powell from Jamaica sets a new world record on the 100 m sprint in Athens with 9.77 seconds.

2006 - Phillips Fox announced that it had entered an exclusive alliance with the international firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary.