The Beatles top the US singles chart (1964), and Texas secedes from the Union (1861). Born on this day: Boris Yeltsin, Clark Gable and John Ford. Died: Werner Heisenberg, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Wisława Szymborska.
36 events, 67 births and 55 deaths on this date.
Their single I Want to Hold Your Hand reached the top of the American chart, a breakthrough for a British group in a market they had not yet conquered. It helped launch the British Invasion of American pop.
Bo Trenter · Public domainTexas's convention voted to leave the Union, a move that tied the state to the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Texas had been a slave state since joining the Union in 1845, and it later became one of the Confederate states.
Lincoln adds his name to the Thirteenth Amendment, which bans slavery and involuntary servitude across the country. Congress had passed it the day before, and it still had to win ratification from the states before it took effect.
Alexander Gardner · Public domain
Edison's workshop in West Orange, nicknamed the Black Maria, was a black tar-papered shed built to be turned toward the sun on a pivoting base. It gave filmmakers their first purpose-built place to shoot moving pictures.
Malaysia's capital was formally given city status, recognising a town that began as a tin-mining settlement in the 1850s. It went on to become the country's financial, political and cultural centre.
thomasgl · Public domain
Speaking in Yan'an, Mao Zedong called for the Communist Party to reform its study habits and its writing, launching a rectification drive. The campaign tightened ideological discipline among members and writers at the wartime base in Shaanxi.
Chen Zhengqing (1917–1966) · Public domain
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Boris Yeltsin was the first popularly elected president of Russia, serving from 1991 to 1999. He helped bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, after first rising through the Communist Party before turning against its leadership.
Presidential Press and Information Office · CC BY 4.0
Clark Gable won the Best Actor Oscar for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, and was known in Hollywood as its top leading man. Across a 37-year career, he appeared in dozens of films and was one of Hollywood's most bankable stars.
Public domain
John Ford was an American film director who made more than 130 films, from silent pictures to the late 1960s. He is best remembered for his Westerns, including Stagecoach and The Searchers, and he won a record four Academy Awards for Best Director.
Los Angeles Daily News · Public domain
Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who helped build quantum mechanics and formulated the uncertainty principle. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 and was also a leading figure in Germany's wartime nuclear programme.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, begun as a ghost-story contest at Lake Geneva in 1816 and published in 1818, often counted as an early work of science fiction. After her husband Percy's drowning in 1822 she spent her later years editing his poems and writing novels, as well as travel writing.
Richard Rothwell · Public domain
Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature for verse that combined irony with precision about history and human life. She spent most of her life in Kraków and wrote with a sharp, wry eye.
Mariusz Kubik · CC BY 3.0
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