June 21 in History

Akechi Mitsuhide betrayed Oda Nobunaga, driving the unifier of Japan to commit suicide in 1582. This sudden collapse of Nobunaga's power plunged the Sengoku period into chaos and allowed Toyotomi Hideyoshi to eventually seize control of the country.

The thirteen states ratified the document that established a federal government divided into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. This framework created the world's shortest written constitution still in force today, influencing countless nations while remaining unchanged for over two centuries except through twenty-seven appended amendments.

John Hinckley's acquittal on grounds of insanity triggered immediate public outrage and forced Congress to rewrite federal insanity defense laws, tightening standards across the nation. The verdict sparked a fierce debate over mental health treatment versus criminal accountability that reshaped legal proceedings for decades.

Five justices agreed on a definition of obscenity — and they still couldn't quite explain it. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote Miller v. California to replace Justice Potter Stewart's infamous non-definition: "I know it when I see it." The new three-part Miller Test asked whether average people found the work offensive, whether it lacked serious artistic value, and who exactly counts as an "average person" anyway. That last question haunted courts for decades. But here's the twist: the test was meant to restrict obscenity. Instead, it accidentally drew the map for what was legally protected.

Scotland voted 99 to 17 to kill a law that had never actually prosecuted anyone. Section 28, passed in 1988, banned councils and schools from "promoting" homosexuality — but no one could agree what promotion even meant. Teachers stayed silent. Librarians pulled books. The chilling effect was real even if the courtrooms stayed empty. Scotland moved first, three years before England and Wales followed in 2003. And the law that spent 15 years terrifying people into silence turned out to have no teeth. Just the fear of them.

Liu Bei died after a devastating defeat at the Battle of Xiaoting left his Shu Han kingdom weakened and his dream of restoring the Han dynasty unfulfilled. His deathbed entrustment of his son and kingdom to the brilliant strategist Zhuge Liang became one of the most famous scenes in Chinese historical literature, immortalized in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Twenty-seven men knelt in Prague's Old Town Square and it took four hours to kill them all. The executioner, Jan Mydlář, worked through nobles, knights, and burghers — Protestant leaders who'd backed the wrong king after White Mountain. Their heads went up on the Charles Bridge as a warning. But here's the thing: Bohemia never really forgot. That square, those iron hooks, that morning in June became the wound Czech national identity kept returning to for three hundred years.

She didn't deny starting the fire. Marie-Joseph Angélique, a Black enslaved woman from Portugal via Madeira, allegedly burned nearly 50 buildings in Montreal trying to escape her owner, Thérèse de Couagne. The plan failed. She was caught, tortured into confession, had her hand severed, and was hanged in June 1734. But historians still argue whether she actually did it. The evidence was thin. The motive was real — she was about to be sold. A woman desperate for freedom became the city's greatest villain. Or its most convenient scapegoat.