Roosevelt orders MacArthur to leave the Philippines (1942), and Egypt and Syria form the United Arab Republic (1958). Born on this day: George Washington, Arthur Schopenhauer and Heinrich Hertz. Died: Andy Warhol, Ferdinand de Saussure and Sabinian.
28 events, 91 births and 67 deaths on this date.
With Japanese forces closing in, Franklin Roosevelt ordered General Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines, where American defeat now looked certain. It was a stark moment in the Pacific war, as the islands' defence was all but lost.
Leon Perskie · CC BY 2.0After both countries approved the union in plebiscites the day before, Egypt and Syria merged into a single state. The United Arab Republic was an attempt to unite the Arab world under one government, though the partnership broke up in 1961.
Savimbi led UNITA, the rebel movement that fought Angola's government for much of the civil war that followed independence in 1975. His death in an ambush removed the figure at the centre of that long conflict.
Saint Lucia cut its formal ties to Britain and became a sovereign nation, though it kept the British monarch as head of state within the Commonwealth. The island had changed hands between Britain and France many times before this settled moment.
Weeks after Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing thawed relations, Washington and Beijing agreed to set up liaison offices in each other's capitals. The move gave the two former enemies a direct diplomatic channel, short of full recognition, during the Cold War.
Department of Defense. Department of the Army. Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. U.S. Army Audiovisual Center. (ca. 1974 - 05/15/1984) · Public domain
Grover Cleveland signed the act that brought North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Washington into the Union together. Admitting them in one bill was a sign of how quickly the northern plains had filled with settlers.
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Remembered as the commander who led Patriot forces to victory in the American Revolutionary War, Washington later became the new nation's first head of state, serving from 1789 to 1797. Known as the Father of His Country for securing independence.
Gilbert Stuart · Public domain
Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who argued that a blind, irrational will drives the world we perceive. His book The World as Will and Representation, published in 1818, was largely ignored in his lifetime but later shaped thinkers in philosophy, literature and science.
Johann Schäfer · Public domain
Hamburg-born physicist who produced and detected the electromagnetic waves that Maxwell's equations had predicted. His experiments turned Maxwell's theory into something that could be tested in a laboratory, and he died young, at thirty-six.
Robert Krewaldt, Kaiserplatz 16, Bonn · Public domain
Andy Warhol died in New York, aged 58, after gallbladder surgery. He became the best-known face of pop art, turning soup cans, celebrities and mass-produced images into serious art.
Bernard Gotfryd · Public domain
Swiss linguist who argued that language is a system of signs whose meaning comes from their relations to one another. His ideas, published posthumously as the Course in General Linguistics, helped found modern linguistics and semiology.
"F. Jullien Genève", maybe Frank-Henri Jullien (1882–1938) · CC BY-SA 4.0
Sabinian was a former papal envoy to Constantinople who became pope in 604 and held the office until his death in 606. He was the fourth pope in a row to have served as the Roman Church's representative at the Byzantine court.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
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