Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is born (1904), and Floods in Pune after Khadakwasla and Panshet dams fail (1961). Born on this day: Pablo Neruda, Malala Yousafzai and Henry David Thoreau. Died: Erasmus, Alexander Hamilton and Alfred Dreyfus.
29 events, 48 births and 60 deaths on this date.
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda went on to win the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Over his life he wrote love poems, surrealist verse and political manifestos, and also worked as a diplomat and a senator.
Unknown ( Mondadori Publishers ) · Public domainFloodwaters swept through the Indian city after two nearby dams gave way, and more than two thousand people died. The dams involved were Khadakwasla and Panshet, and the flood struck Pune, a city in western India.
After centuries as a Portuguese colony built on sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, the islands won independence peacefully. The new state began as a one-party communist republic, a system that lasted until 1990.
Second Lieutenant Kléber Dupuy and his men beat back a German assault on Fort Souville during the Battle of Verdun, at a moment when the fort could easily have fallen. The defence helped keep the French line at Verdun intact through a battle that cost enormous lives.
The Ottoman forces took Euboea, the large Aegean island off the Greek mainland, from Venetian hands. It was one of the steps that drew the empire deeper into control of the Aegean world.
Under pressure from Napoleon, Bavaria and fifteen other German states broke away from the Holy Roman Empire to form the Confederation of the Rhine. It loosened the empire's grip just before it collapsed two months later.
For the full day, download Chunks today. Every date, the stories behind them, and a new day each morning. Free to start.
Chilean poet, diplomat and politician, best known for love poems such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and was a close ally of President Salvador Allende.
Unknown ( Mondadori Publishers ) · Public domain
Pakistani activist who campaigns for girls' education, especially in her native Swat valley, where militants at times barred girls from school. She won the Nobel Peace Prize at 17, making her the youngest winner ever.
DFID - UK Department for International Development · CC BY 2.0
Thoreau was an American writer who lived simply by Walden Pond and wrote Walden, a reflection on living with less. His essay Civil Disobedience argued that citizens may refuse to obey unjust laws, an idea later taken up by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
B. D. Maxham · Public domain
Erasmus was a Dutch humanist whose Greek New Testament and translations shaped scholars across Europe, on both sides of the Reformation divide. He spent much of his career in Basel and other cities, writing in a clear, elegant Latin that made him famous.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Public domain
Hamilton was the first United States Secretary of the Treasury and a key architect of the new nation's finances. He died on this day in 1804 from wounds sustained in a duel with Aaron Burr.
John Trumbull · Public domain
Dreyfus was a French artillery officer wrongly convicted of spying for Germany in 1894, whose case split France and exposed army antisemitism. Cleared years later, he was reinstated at a lower rank and later served in the First World War.
Aron Gerschel · Public domain
Download on iOS
Download on Android