Vladimir Lenin survives an assassination attempt (1918), and Free settlers from Van Diemen's Land found Melbourne (1835). Born on this day: Ernest Rutherford, Alexander Lukashenko and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Died: Mikhail Gorbachev, Naguib Mahfouz and J.J. Thomson.
27 events, 62 births and 56 deaths on this date.
Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, survived an attempt on his life. The attack came as his government was centralising power in the new Communist Party.
Pavel Zhukov · Public domainA group of free settlers from Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, established the settlement on the shores of Port Phillip Bay. It later became the capital of the Colony of Victoria, and by the late 1880s had grown into one of the wealthiest cities in Australia, thanks to the gold rush.
Land speculators Augustus and John Kirby Allen laid out the town where Buffalo Bayou meets White Oak Bayou. It was named after Sam Houston, whose victory at San Jacinto had won Texas its independence from Mexico.
James VI of Scotland staged a masque to celebrate the christening of Henry Frederick, his first child and heir. The event was a lavish display of royal power and Stuart prestige.
John de Critz · Public domain
Captives in Singapore rose up against their Japanese guards after being ordered to pledge they would not try to escape. The revolt was a refusal to accept that condition, which asked men held in custody to give up any attempt to get free.
Ieyasu moved into Edo Castle after being relocated to the Kanto plains by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a move that placed him far from Hideyoshi's power base in Osaka. The fishing village he took over would later become Tokyo, and it went on to be the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Kanō Tan'yū · Public domain
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New Zealand-born physicist who showed that atoms keep their charge in a tiny central nucleus, and who later made the first man-made nuclear reaction by firing alpha particles into nitrogen. He won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactive substances.
George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) · Public domain
Alexander Lukashenko is a Belarusian politician who has led Belarus as its only president since 1994, making him the longest-serving president in Europe. He is known for keeping much of the Soviet-era economic model and state ownership of key industries intact.
Пресс-служба Раиса Республики Татарстан · CC BY 4.0
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, begun during a stormy summer near Geneva in 1816 and published in 1818. Often called an early work of science fiction, it has outlasted nearly every Gothic novel of its time.
Richard Rothwell · Public domain
Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 until it dissolved in 1991, pushing reforms such as glasnost and perestroika. He is remembered as the man who ended Soviet rule and reshaped the country's politics.
Leo Medvedev/Лев Леонидович Медведев · CC BY-SA 4.0
Egyptian novelist who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1988. His best-known works include the Cairo Trilogy, and he set every one of his novels in Egypt.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
In 1897 he showed that cathode rays were streams of tiny charged bodies, far smaller than atoms, and the first subatomic particle to be found. He also taught seven students who went on to win Nobel Prizes.
Bain News Service, publisher · Public domain
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