Birth of Louis Armstrong, American jazz trumpeter (1901), and Custer's 7th Cavalry first clashes with Cheyenne and Lakota in Montana (1873). Born on this day: Barack Obama, Louis Armstrong and Knut Hamsun. Died: Hans Christian Andersen, Tsung-Dao Lee and Enver Paşa.
32 events, 81 births and 63 deaths on this date.
Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans and grew up to become one of jazz's most influential trumpeters and singers. He moved the music's focus from group improvisation towards solo playing, and his recordings include What a Wonderful World.
Harry Warnecke, Gus Schoenbaechler · CC0Custer's troopers were escorting surveyors mapping a railway route when they met Cheyenne and Lakota warriors by the Tongue River. Each side lost just one man, an early clash in the wider Plains wars.
The Cook Islands took on a new constitution, gaining self-government while keeping its free association with New Zealand. The arrangement still shapes the islands' citizenship, defence and foreign affairs today.
Acting on a tip-off, Nazi police arrested the eight people hiding in the Amsterdam annex, ending their two years in concealment. Anne's diary, left behind in the rooms, was later published and became one of the best-known records of the Holocaust.
Anonymous Unknown author · Public domain
On this day the sun-disc flag was set as the official flag for Japanese vessels, a step toward the design the country would later keep. Although no law named a national flag until 1999, this decision already marked the Hinomaru as the one people saw at sea.
Leo XIII, a pope keen to link Catholic teaching with modern thought, pushed the theology of Thomas Aquinas as the Church's guiding philosophy. The following year he backed a critical edition of Aquinas's works, the Editio Leonina, to give scholars a reliable text.
Braun et Compagnie · Public domain
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Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, serving from 2009 to 2017 and becoming the first African American to hold the office. Before entering national politics he worked as a community organiser in Chicago and taught constitutional law.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza · Public domain
Louis Armstrong was a New Orleans-born trumpeter and singer who shifted jazz from group improvisation toward the solo. Known as Satchmo, he became an international star whose warm stage presence matched his playing.
Harry Warnecke, Gus Schoenbaechler · CC0
Norwegian novelist who won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature for Growth of the Soil. Kafka and Hemingway were among the writers he influenced, and he pioneered psychological fiction using stream of consciousness.
Nasjonalbiblioteket from Norway · Public domain
Danish writer best remembered for his literary fairy tales, among them The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and The Snow Queen. His stories have reached readers in well over a hundred languages and inspired ballets, plays and films.
Thora Hallager · Public domain
Tsung-Dao Lee was a Chinese-American physicist who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with Chen Ning Yang, at just 30, for showing that nature does not always treat mirror images alike. He taught at Columbia University in New York for almost six decades.
Nobel foundation · Public domain
Enver Paşa was the Ottoman war minister who helped drag the empire into the First World War and was a leading architect of the genocides against Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. He was killed in 1922 while fighting Bolshevik-backed forces in Central Asia, after years in exile.
Unidentified photographer · Public domain
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