Charles IX of Sweden founds the city of Oulu (1605), and Italy and Prussia sign secret alliance against Austria (1866). Born on this day: Kofi Annan, Mary Pickford and Edmund Husserl. Died: Pablo Picasso, Margaret Thatcher and Peter Higgs.
32 events, 62 births and 67 deaths on this date.
Swedish king Charles IX set up the town at the mouth of the river of the same name on Finland's north-western coast. Its early trade in tar and fish has given way to a major technology industry.
Creator:Jacob Boström · Public domainItaly agreed to join Prussia in a war against Austria, hoping to win Venetia from Austrian control. The secret pact, known as the Treaty of Berlin, bound the two states together before the Austro-Prussian War broke out.
The two countries agreed to talks on handing back German territory the Dutch had annexed after the Second World War, in exchange for 280 million German marks paid as compensation. The deal was a rare postwar settlement over land and reparations between former wartime enemies.
A group of computer specialists gathered to talk over a shared programming language for business work. That discussion fed into COBOL, which went on to run payroll, banking and record-keeping systems for decades.
Troops of the 6th Infantry set out from St. Louis to join the campaign against the Sauk leader Black Hawk, whose people had returned to their homeland in Illinois. The conflict became known as the Black Hawk War.
Russia's emperor, who also ruled Finland as grand duke, formally moved the Finnish capital from Turku to Helsinki. The shift reflected Helsinki's growing importance and set the city on course to become the country's administrative centre.
Alexander Molinari · Public domain
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Kofi Annan was a Ghanaian diplomat who led the United Nations from 1997 to 2006, and he shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the organisation. He was the first person to rise to the top job after working within the UN's own staff.
US Mission in Geneva · Public domain
Canadian-born actress who became one of the biggest stars of the silent era, earning the nickname America's Sweetheart. She also co-founded United Artists and won an Academy Award for Coquette.
Rufus Porter Moody · Public domain
Husserl founded phenomenology, a method of studying experience as it is lived, from the inside. He began as a mathematician, and his ideas shaped much of twentieth-century philosophy.
Unknown (Mondadori Publishers) · Public domain
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor who made his home in France. He co-founded Cubism, helped invent collage, and painted Guernica, an anti-war picture of a bombing during the Spanish Civil War.
Argentina . Revista Vea y Lea · Public domain
Britain's first woman prime minister, she led the country from 1979 to 1990 and gave her name to Thatcherism, built on privatisation, individual liberty and curbing trade unions. A Soviet journalist coined the nickname 'Iron Lady', which suited her uncompromising style.
derivative work by Begoon · Copyrighted free use
Peter Higgs proposed in 1964 that a field gives particles their mass, predicting the particle later named after him. Its discovery at CERN in 2012 earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year.
Bengt Nyman · CC BY 2.0
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