Reagan lifts price controls on petroleum products (1981), and Iceland becomes first Western country to legalise therapeutic abortion (1935). Born on this day: Nicolas Sarkozy, Jackson Pollock and Henry VII. Died: Charlemagne, William Butler Yeats and Sir Francis Drake.
29 events, 83 births and 70 deaths on this date.
Reagan ended government caps on the prices of petroleum products, letting them move with the market. Freeing prices this way was one thing that fed the oil glut of the 1980s.
Michael Evans · Public domainIceland's parliament made therapeutic abortion legal, making it the first Western country to do so. The law allowed the procedure where a pregnancy threatened a woman's health, a step that drew attention across Europe.
Choudhry Rahmat Ali Khan proposed the name Pakistan, and Indian Muslims embraced it. The word then became the banner of the Pakistan Movement, which sought independence for a Muslim homeland.
American forces withdrew from Cuba, keeping only the Guantanamo Bay naval base they had held since the Spanish–American War. The departure marked the end of a US occupation that had begun after Spain lost the island in 1898.
Privateer Henry Morgan's raiders sacked the Spanish colonial city of Panama and set it alight, leaving the old town in ruins. The remains, known as Panama Viejo, still stand today as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Presley, then a rising Memphis singer, appeared on national television for the first time, performing on the Stage Show programme. The broadcast helped turn a regional name into a nationwide sensation.
For the full day, download Chunks today. Every date, the stories behind them, and a new day each morning. Free to start.
Nicolas Sarkozy is a former French politician who held the country's highest office from 2007 to 2012. He is remembered for steering France through the 2008 financial crisis and later for a corruption conviction.
European People's Party · CC BY 2.0
Jackson Pollock was an American painter who poured and splashed household paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor. His drip technique, which let him paint from every side, made him a leading figure of abstract expressionism.
Hans Namuth · Public domain
Henry VII was the first Tudor king of England, and he won the crown on the battlefield at Bosworth Field in 1485. He ended the Wars of the Roses, in part by marrying Elizabeth of York, and restored stability to a weakened monarchy.
anonymous · Public domain
Charlemagne ruled the Franks from 768 and was crowned emperor in Rome in 800, the first to hold that title in the West for centuries. He brought most of Western and Central Europe under one rule, and his conquests spread Christianity through the region.
Charlemagne. Autorité émettrice de monnaie indéterminé. Atelier monétaire. Émetteur · Public domain
Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright who helped found the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He is remembered as one of the defining voices of twentieth-century English-language poetry.
George Charles Beresford · Public domain
Drake was an English sailor and privateer who sailed round the world in 1577 to 1580, the second such voyage and the first by an English crew. He later helped repel the Spanish Armada in 1588 and died of dysentery on a Caribbean expedition.
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger · Public domain
Download on iOS
Download on Android