Maria Theresa abolishes torture across Habsburg Austria and Bohemia (1776), and Serial killer Peter Sutcliffe arrested in Sheffield (1981). Born on this day: Isaac Asimov, St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Rudolf Clausius. Died: Frederick William IV, Emil Jannings and Mohamed Siad Barre.
32 events, 61 births and 58 deaths on this date.
Maria Theresa amended her criminal code, the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, to outlaw torture in her Austrian and Bohemian lands. She ruled the Habsburg monarchy for forty years and was its only woman sovereign in her own right.
Martin van Meytens · Public domainPolice arrested Peter Sutcliffe in Sheffield, ending one of the largest investigations ever mounted by a British police force. The man known as the Yorkshire Ripper had killed women across northern England, and his capture closed the hunt for him.
Two new honours were created that day: Bharat Ratna and Padma Vibhushan. They sat at the top of India's system of civilian decorations, recognising service to the nation across many fields.
Guizado had taken power after the assassination of president José Antonio Remón Cantera, but he was ousted within days once investigators linked him to the killing. The episode exposed deep rot in Panamanian politics in the mid-1950s.
Georgia voted to adopt the new US Constitution, becoming the fourth state to do so and helping bring the document closer to taking effect. Ratification needed nine states, so each vote mattered in the young republic.
Japanese troops took Manila early in the Second World War, giving them control of the Philippines' capital and much of the archipelago. The capture was a major step in Japan's campaign across the Pacific.
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Asimov was a biochemist turned science fiction writer, best known for the Foundation series about a collapsing galactic empire. He wrote over 500 books on many subjects, and his story Nightfall was voted the best science fiction short story ever.
Phillip Leonian [ 1 ] from New York World-Telegram & Sun. [ 2 ] · Public domain
A French Carmelite nun who died of tuberculosis at 24, she became a beloved saint after her memoir, The Story of a Soul, spread her simple Little Way of holiness. Pope John Paul II made her a Doctor of the Church in 1997.
Céline Martin · Public domain
Clausius was a mathematician and physicist from Prussia, one of the founders of thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy. He restated Sadi Carnot's principle on heat engines, and in 1865 he introduced entropy, a measure of energy's loss of usefulness.
Unknown Unknown · Public domain
Frederick William IV was King of Prussia from 1840 until his death, a deeply religious monarch who ruled by divine right. He answered the revolutions of 1848 with a constitution he granted on his own terms, and he backed the completion of Cologne Cathedral.
Hermann Biow · Public domain
Swiss-born German actor who won the first Academy Award for Best Actor, and starred in The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich. He later took leading roles in state-commissioned films in Nazi Germany.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Barre ruled Somalia for over twenty years after seizing power in a 1969 coup, turning it into a one-party Marxist state. He was ousted in 1991, and the country's collapse that followed left it without a stable government for decades.
Government of Somalia · Public domain
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