Hitler orders development of a rocket weapon (1942), and Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia gain final independence (1990). Born on this day: Giacomo Puccini, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Ralph Fiennes. Died: Samuel Beckett, George Eliot and Joe Cocker.
33 events, 66 births and 63 deaths on this date.
Hitler authorised work on what became the V-2, the first long-range ballistic missile. Its development at Peenemünde would later lead to rocket attacks on London and Antwerp in 1944 and 1945.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0 deAfter decades under United Nations trusteeship administered by the United States, the two Pacific nations became fully sovereign states. The Marshall Islands is an atoll nation north of the equator, most of whose territory is lagoon water.
Truman's order moved people uprooted by the war to the front of the queue for American visas, though they still had to fit within existing national quotas. It was an early step in how the US handled displaced Europeans after the fighting.
National Archives and Records Administration. Office of Presidential Libraries. Harry S. Truman Library. · Public domain
Vespasian was hailed as emperor while his rival Vitellius, who tried to step down, was seized and killed on the Gemonian stairs. The killing ended a bitter struggle for power in Rome.
Protesters in Bucharest had turned against Nicolae Ceaușescu, and the army sided with the crowds. He fled the capital by helicopter, ending more than two decades of his rule over Romania.
Attribution
A fire swept through the Capitol in Washington and gutted the young Library of Congress, which served Congress as its reference collection. The loss was a major setback, as the library had only recently been rebuilt after the British burned much of its original stock in 1814.
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Puccini wrote operas that remain among the most performed in the world, including La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. He carried the Italian operatic tradition into the realistic verismo style, bringing ordinary human emotion to the stage.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician who worked out deep results in number theory and infinite series largely on his own. After writing to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge, he was invited to England, where his notebooks of unusual theorems reshaped whole areas of mathematics.
Konrad Jacobs · Public domain
English actor and director, remembered for Amon Göth in Schindler's List and Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films. He also won a Tony Award for playing Hamlet on Broadway.
Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan · CC BY 2.0
Irish writer whose stark, tragicomic plays, above all Waiting for Godot, transformed modern theatre and won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He spent most of his adult life in Paris, writing in both French and English.
Roger Pic · Public domain
Mary Ann Evans, writing as George Eliot, was a Victorian novelist whose books, including Middlemarch and Silas Marner, are known for their psychological insight and rural settings. She lived openly with George Henry Lewes, a married man, which was unusual for her time.
replica by François D’Albert Durade (1804–1886) · Public domain
Joe Cocker was an English singer whose gritty, bluesy voice and physical stage style made his cover of the Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends a hit. He also recorded Up Where We Belong with Jennifer Warnes, a US number one that won a Grammy.
Thesupermat · CC BY-SA 3.0
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