Women allowed to argue cases before US Supreme Court (1879), and Justinian II executes his two predecessors in Constantinople (706). Born on this day: Galileo, Louis XV and Charles Édouard Guillaume. Died: Richard Feynman, Sir Owen Willans Richardson and Nat King Cole.
34 events, 85 births and 59 deaths on this date.
Hayes signed a law letting women plead cases before the Supreme Court, ending a bar that had kept them out. Best known for his disputed 1876 election win, he signed this quieter step for women in the law.
Mathew Benjamin Brady · Public domainTwo former emperors, Leontios and Tiberios III, were put to death before crowds in Constantinople's Hippodrome on the orders of Justinian II. Public executions in the city's great racecourse were a deliberate display of imperial power.
French fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau founded it at the Mississippi and Missouri meeting point, naming it for King Louis IX of France. It became the regional hub of the French Illinois Country, and the United States took it over in 1804.
Tsar Nicholas II issued the February Manifesto, which curbed the self-rule Finland had enjoyed inside the Russian Empire. It opened a harsh stretch of Russian control that Finns resisted for years.
Boissonnas & Eggler · Public domain
Lombard nobles meeting in Pavia restored Arduin of Ivrea to his lands and crowned him King of Italy. Pavia had served as the kingdom's capital since 774, so holding the ceremony there gave the crowning added weight.
After a long debate over replacing the Union Flag, Canada settled on a red maple leaf design by historian George Stanley. The flag still stands as the country's most recognised national symbol, and the date is now marked each year as National Flag of Canada Day.
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Galileo was an Italian astronomer and physicist who turned a homemade telescope on the sky and recorded Jupiter's four largest moons. His work on motion and observation helped lay the foundations of modern science.
Justus Sustermans · Public domain
Louis XV became King of France at five and ruled for almost 59 years, the second longest reign in French history. Historians often blame his extravagance and failures for weakening the monarchy and leaving his grandson a crisis that helped trigger the Revolution.
Manner of Louis-Michel van Loo · Public domain
Guillaume was a Swiss physicist who discovered unusual behaviour in nickel steel alloys, work that made precision measurements far more reliable. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920 for it.
Auguste Léon · Public domain
Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for quantum electrodynamics. He is also remembered for Feynman diagrams, a pictorial method still used to track how subatomic particles behave, and for his role on the panel investigating the Challenger disaster.
Copyright Tamiko Thiel 1984 · CC BY-SA 3.0
Richardson was a British physicist who studied how hot metals give off electrons, work that earned him the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physics. The relationship he described between temperature and that emission is still known as Richardson's law.
Nobel foundation · Public domain
Nat King Cole was an American jazz pianist turned pop singer, known for hits like Unforgettable and Mona Lisa. He also became the first Black American to host a nationally broadcast television show, in 1956.
William P. Gottlieb · Public domain
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