Carter announces US recognition of China, cutting ties with Taiwan (1978), and Mass killing of Jews at Drobytsky Yar near Kharkiv (1941). Born on this day: L.L. Zamenhof, Nero and Henri Becquerel. Died: Walt Disney, Wolfgang Pauli and Vallabhbhai Patel.
30 events, 63 births and 52 deaths on this date.
President Jimmy Carter declared that Washington would recognise the People's Republic of China and end formal relations with Taiwan. The move reshaped Cold War diplomacy and remains the basis of American policy towards both governments.
Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. Naval Photographic Center · Public domainNazi forces killed more than 15,000 Jews in a ravine southeast of Kharkiv, in occupied Ukraine. The killings were part of the Holocaust, the Nazi campaign to murder Europe's Jews.
Hulagu's forces entered Alamut, the mountain fortress of the Nizari Ismailis, and tore it down. The loss ended the power of the sect known in the West as the Assassins.
President Obama marked the withdrawal of the last American troops from Iraq, closing a conflict that began with the 2003 invasion. The war had toppled Saddam Hussein but left the country divided and unstable for years afterwards.
Indian agency police sent to arrest Sitting Bull on the Standing Rock reservation shot him dead, backed by US officers and troops. Officials feared he would join the Ghost Dance movement, and he had led Lakota resistance against US government policies for decades.
David Francis Barry · Public domain
A deep-level electric line, later the Piccadilly line, began carrying passengers between Finsbury Park and the western end of London. It was one of the tube routes that helped turn the Underground into a single network.
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Zamenhof was an eye doctor from Białystok who created Esperanto, a constructed language meant to help people from different countries communicate on equal terms. He published it in 1887, and it still has a living community of speakers today.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Nero was the last emperor of Rome's Julio-Claudian dynasty, ruling until his suicide. He is remembered for scandalising the aristocracy with public performances as an actor and charioteer, and for murders Roman sources blame on him, including his mother's and wife's.
Jastrow · Public domain
French physicist who found that uranium salts give off mysterious rays, a discovery that opened the field of radioactivity. He won a Nobel Prize in 1903, alongside the Curies.
Paul Nadar / Adam Cuerden · Public domain
Walt Disney, the American animator who created Mickey Mouse, died in 1966. He won more Academy Awards than any other individual and built a studio that grew into one of the world's largest entertainment companies.
Boy Scouts of America · Public domain
Wolfgang Pauli was a theoretical physicist whose exclusion principle explained how electrons fill atomic shells, earning him the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics. He also proposed the neutrino in 1930 to save energy conservation in beta decay, a particle first detected in 1956.
Bettina Katzenstein · CC BY-SA 4.0
Sardar Patel was a lawyer who organised peasant civil disobedience against the British in Gujarat, then became India's first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. He oversaw the political integration of India after independence.
Government of India work · Public domain
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