Cartier returns to St Malo from St Lawrence voyage (1536), and George Washington signs Residence Act choosing Potomac capital site (1790). Born on this day: Roald Amundsen, Trygve Lie and Barbara Stanwyck. Died: Heinrich Böll, Élie Metchnikoff and Julian Seymour Schwinger.
32 events, 62 births and 50 deaths on this date.
Breton navigator Jacques Cartier arrived home in St Malo after mapping the Gulf of St Lawrence and visiting the Iroquoian settlements of Stadacona and Hochelaga. The trip gave France a claim to the river region, and the name Canada came from local Iroquoian words.
Théophile Hamel / After François Nicholas Riss · CC BY-SA 4.0Washington signed the law choosing a permanent capital on the Potomac, a site that would later bear his name. Carved from land in Maryland and Virginia, the district is treated as the city's founding.
On Lincoln's orders, Union soldiers set off on a 25-mile advance into Virginia. The move led to the Battle of Bull Run, the first large land fight of the war.
Rebels in La Paz, in today's Bolivia, set up the Junta Tuitiva under Pedro Domingo Murillo, the first self-governing body of its kind in Spanish America. The break from Spain made it a landmark in the wider struggle for independence across South America.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility, and Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon. Their mission, the culmination of the Space Race, ended with a safe splashdown in the Pacific four days later.
NASA · Public domain
Emperor Haile Selassie issued Ethiopia's first modern written constitution, a step in his effort to modernise the empire's government. It set out a parliament and limits on the monarchy, though real power stayed firmly with the emperor.
unknown; according to [1] and [2] an official portrait of which b/w copies were distributed by the Ethiopian government · Public domain
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Norwegian explorer who led the first team to reach the South Pole, in December 1911, beating Robert Falcon Scott by about five weeks. He later became the first verified person to reach the North Pole, by airship, in 1926.
Anonymous Unknown author · Public domain
Norwegian politician and jurist who became the United Nations' first leader in 1946, guiding the young organisation through its earliest years. Earlier, he served as foreign minister for Norway's government in exile in London during the Second World War.
atelier Benkow · CC BY-SA 3.0
American actress and dancer who spent six decades on stage, in film and on television, known for her realistic screen presence. Directors including Frank Capra and Cecil B. DeMille prized her, and she was nominated for four Academy Awards.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Heinrich Böll was a German writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. He is remembered as one of Germany's most important post-war novelists, known for works that confronted the country's wartime past.
Hoffmann, Harald · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
The Russian Empire zoologist who discovered that certain immune cells engulf invading microbes, a finding that became the foundation of modern immunology. He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Ehrlich.
Nadar · Public domain
Julian Schwinger was an American theoretical physicist who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for reworking quantum electrodynamics, the theory of how light and electrons interact. His equations and methods remain standard tools in modern particle physics.
Nobel foundation · Public domain
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