Mars draws nearer to Earth than in millennia (2003), and Moldova declares independence from the Soviet Union (1991). Born on this day: Lyndon B. Johnson, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Charles G. Dawes. Died: Le Corbusier, Haile Selassie I and Titian.
31 events, 57 births and 68 deaths on this date.
Mars swung to within about 34.6 million miles of Earth, the nearest it had come in tens of thousands of years. The orange-red planet, tinted by iron oxide in its dust, shone unusually brightly in the night sky.
Kevin Gill from Los Angeles, CA, United States · CC BY 2.0As the Soviet Union began to collapse, Moldova's parliament declared the republic independent and renamed it Moldova. The move ended decades of Soviet rule over the former Bessarabia region and set the country on its own course.
Drillers struck oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, giving the world its first well run purely to sell crude oil. The find launched a boom that turned a liquid once collected from surface seeps into a mass-market fuel and raw material.
Chad's government blamed Egypt for backing the failed plot and cut diplomatic ties with Cairo. Coups were frequent worldwide in the mid-1970s, and this one ended in a rift between two states.
Toulon's citizens turned against the Republic in the Federalist revolts and handed their port to British and Spanish warships. The move drew a French Revolutionary army to lay siege to the city.
A reference book was born from a simple idea: settle pub arguments with facts. Twins Norris and Ross McWhirter put it together, and it topped the UK bestseller list by Christmas.
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Born in Stonewall, Texas, Johnson rose from teacher to the 36th US president, taking office after Kennedy's assassination. He is remembered for the Great Society programmes, including Medicare, and for escalating the Vietnam War.
Arnold Newman · Public domain
Hegel was a German philosopher who built a sweeping system of absolute idealism, seeing history as humanity's rational growth toward self-knowledge. His dialectical method, moving from contradiction to a fuller unity, shaped philosophy for generations afterwards.
Jakob Schlesinger · Public domain
Dawes was a Republican politician who served as US vice president under Calvin Coolidge and shared the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize for the Dawes Plan, which eased Germany's postwar reparations. He was also an accomplished amateur pianist.
Harris & Ewing · Public domain
Le Corbusier was a Swiss-French architect and urban planner who helped shape modern building design. He is remembered for his work on Chandigarh in India and for ideas about better living in crowded cities, though his links to fascism have made him controversial.
Joop van Bilsen for Anefo · CC0
Ethiopia's emperor for four decades, he led his country through the Italian invasion and exile, then helped found the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. Deposed by a military junta in 1974, he died in custody the following year.
unknown; according to [1] and [2] an official portrait of which b/w copies were distributed by the Ethiopian government · Public domain
Titian was the leading painter of Renaissance Venice, admired for his portraits, landscapes and mythological scenes. His use of colour and loose brushwork shaped generations of Western painters who followed him.
Titian · Public domain
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