Traditional date for the fall of Troy (1183 BC), and Nazi authorities shut the Watch Tower Society office in Magdeburg (1933). Born on this day: Barbra Streisand, Philippe Pétain and Carl Spitteler. Died: Daniel Defoe, Max von Laue and Gerhard Domagk.
25 events, 65 births and 58 deaths on this date.
Eratosthenes, the head librarian at Alexandria, was among those who put the fall of Troy on this date, counting it as the close of the Trojan War. Troy's ruins at Hisarlık show many rebuilt layers, but no definite evidence confirms a Greek attack.
CC BY-SA 3.0The Nazi government closed the Magdeburg office of the Watch Tower Society, the first blow in a campaign against Jehovah's Witnesses. The group's refusal to swear loyalty to Hitler and its rejection of military service made it a target for years of arrests and imprisonment.
Ottoman authorities seized hundreds of Armenian leaders and intellectuals in the capital, opening the campaign historians call the Armenian genocide. Those taken were the people most able to organise resistance, so their removal stripped the community of leadership before mass deportations began.
Henry Morgenthau · Public domain
NASA and the European Space Agency sent the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit on Discovery's STS-31 mission. It went on to become one of the most productive instruments in astronomy, though its flawed mirror had to be fixed by astronauts later.
NASA · Public domain
Congress set up the library as part of a law moving the capital from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. It started as a small reference collection in the Capitol and grew into one of the largest libraries in the world.
Carol M. Highsmith · CC BY-SA 3.0
Printed in Boston by John Campbell, it was the first regularly issued newspaper in the British colonies of North America. Its weekly pages gave colonists news from Britain and the other colonies, and it ran for decades.
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American singer, actress and filmmaker who is one of few people to win all four major performing arts awards. She won her Oscar for Funny Girl, and her songs include The Way We Were.
NIH Image Gallery from Bethesda, Maryland, USA · Public domain
Philippe Pétain was a French First World War commander, hailed as the Lion of Verdun for holding the line there. He later led the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War, a role that left his name tied to shame long after his death in 1951.
Imprimerie Draeger à Montrouge en région parisienne · Public domain
Swiss poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919, largely for his long epic Olympian Spring. He wrote both gloomy and heroic verse across a long career.
A. B. Lagrelius & Westphal, Stockholm · Public domain
English writer and journalist best remembered for Robinson Crusoe, a novel so influential it gave its name to a whole genre, the Robinsonade. He also wrote political tracts that often landed him in trouble with the authorities.
Unknown Unknown , style of Sir Godfrey Kneller · Public domain
German physicist who won the 1914 Nobel Prize for showing that X-rays diffract when they pass through crystals. He also spoke out against the Nazis and helped rebuild German science after the war.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
German bacteriologist who found that the dye-based compound Prontosil fought bacterial infection, the first commercially available antibiotic. The Nazi government stopped him collecting his 1939 Nobel Prize, which he received in 1947.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
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