Octavian celebrates his Dalmatian victory with a second triumph in Rome (29 BC), and Bahrain declares independence from Britain (1971). Born on this day: Halle Berry, Dani Rodrik and Hans Christian Ørsted. Died: Bertolt Brecht, Czesław Miłosz and Elias Canetti.
29 events, 56 births and 68 deaths on this date.
Octavian rode through Rome in the second of three triumphs that year, marking his campaign against the Dalmatian tribes. The celebrations were a public display of the power he was building toward becoming Augustus.
С. И. Сосновский · CC BY-SA 4.0CleopatraHear the story in ChunksBahrain, a group of islands in the Persian Gulf, ended its status as a British protectorate and became a sovereign state. The move followed decades of treaties that had left the British in charge of its foreign affairs.
English navigator John Davis, sailing south of South America, became the first European known to glimpse the remote archipelago. Its later disputed ownership between Britain and Argentina grew out of this early sighting and the colonies that followed.
Wałęsa, an electrician, was the face of a wave of strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, where workers pressed the government for free trade unions. Those protests led to the Gdańsk Agreement and the birth of Solidarity, the movement that later helped end Communist rule in Poland.
Led by Huo Guang, senior ministers gave regent Empress Dowager Shangguan charges against Liu He, who had only just become emperor. Ministers held real power in the Western Han court, and this move showed how far they would go.
In Rio, Bolt took the 100 metres title for a third Games running, following his wins in Beijing and London. Only he has won both the 100 and 200 metres at three consecutive Olympics.
Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil · CC BY 3.0 br
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Halle Berry is an American actress who began as a beauty queen and model before becoming the first Black woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, for Monster's Ball in 2001. She is also known for playing Storm in the X-Men films and for her Emmy-winning turn as Dorothy Dandridge.
Gage Skidmore · CC BY-SA 3.0
Dani Rodrik is a Turkish economist who teaches international political economy at Harvard's Kennedy School. He studies why some governments adopt good economic policy and others do not, and wrote books such as The Globalization Paradox.
Andrzej Barabasz · CC BY-SA 3.0
Ørsted showed that electricity and magnetism are connected, a discovery that shaped later work on electrical machines. He also produced aluminium, and he was a close friend of Hans Christian Andersen.
Christian Albrecht Jensen · Public domain
Brecht was the German playwright behind The Threepenny Opera and the idea of epic theatre, which asked audiences to watch critically rather than lose themselves in the drama. He died in East Berlin, where he had co-founded the Berliner Ensemble.
Kolbe, Jörg · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Polish poet and diplomat who survived the Warsaw occupation, defected from communist Poland, and won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. His book The Captive Mind, a critique of Stalinism, made him a leading exile intellectual.
Artur Pawłowski · CC BY-SA 4.0
Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, he wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. He is best remembered for Crowds and Power, a nonfiction book on mass behaviour and authority.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl
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