Fire breaks out in the roof of Notre-Dame in Paris (2019), and Torrential rain breaches Mississippi River levees in 145 places (1927). Born on this day: Leonardo da Vinci, Leonhard Euler and Kim Il-Sung. Died: Abraham Lincoln, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pol Pot.
31 events, 82 births and 74 deaths on this date.
The medieval cathedral's wooden roof and spire burned for hours, while its stone vaulting held and kept the interior largely intact. The blaze prompted a worldwide effort to rebuild, and the cathedral reopened in December 2024.
LeLaisserPasserA38 · CC BY-SA 4.0Heavy rain overwhelmed the embankments holding back the Mississippi at 145 or more points, making it the worst flood in the nation's recorded history. The river runs about 2,340 miles from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, so the flooding stretched a long way.
Insulin, a hormone made in the pancreas, helps move glucose from the blood into cells, lowering blood sugar. For people with diabetes, it offered a way to manage a condition that had often been fatal.
Walking near Ullswater, the poet and his sister Dorothy came upon a long band of daffodils beside the lake. The sight inspired him to write 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', now his best-known poem.
The Athens Games ended today, closing the first modern Olympics, which drew about 240 male athletes from fourteen nations. Greece topped the medal table with 47, and Spyridon Louis's marathon win was the hosts' highlight.
Mamluk forces beat a Mongol army at Elbistan, in what is now southern Turkey. The win helped the Cairo-based sultanate hold its ground against Mongol expansion in the region.
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Italian polymath of the High Renaissance, remembered for paintings such as the Mona Lisa and for notebooks full of sketches on anatomy, astronomy and engineering. Born out of wedlock near Vinci, he trained in Florence and later worked for the Sforza court in Milan.
Attributed to Francesco Melzi · Public domain
Swiss polymath who founded graph theory and topology and gave mathematics much of its modern notation, including the symbol π for the circle ratio and f(x) for functions. Much of his working life was spent in St Petersburg and Berlin.
Jakob Emanuel Handmann · Public domain
Kim Il-Sung was a communist guerrilla fighter who became the first leader of North Korea, ruling it from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994. He built a tightly controlled state that his son later inherited.
Jesse Charlie · CC0
Lincoln, the 16th president, was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington and died the next morning. He had led the Union through the Civil War and pushed through the end of slavery in the United States.
Alexander Gardner · Public domain
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher and writer, one of the central figures of existentialism, who argued that people must create their own meaning through free choice. He won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused the honour, insisting that writers should not become institutions.
User:T1980 · CC BY 3.0
Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 and presided over a genocide that killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people. He died in 1998 while living under house arrest near the Thai border, never tried for his crimes.
Unknown author Unknown author · Attribution
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