Jacques Cartier claims the Gaspé Peninsula for France (1534), and Twitter is renamed X by Elon Musk (2023). Born on this day: Simón Bolívar, Jennifer Lopez and Alexandre Dumas, père. Died: Martin Van Buren, James Chadwick and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
34 events, 71 births and 32 deaths on this date.
Breton navigator Jacques Cartier set up a cross on the Gaspé coast and claimed the land for the French crown. Later voyages took him up the Saint Lawrence, where he mapped the coast and gave the land the name Canada.
Théophile Hamel / After François Nicholas Riss · CC BY-SA 4.0Elon Musk replaced the Twitter name and branding with X, a platform he had bought for $44 billion in October 2022. The change turned one of the world's most-visited social networks into a service carrying a single letter as its name.
Torrential rain loosened a hillside and sent a mudslide through the city, flattening a bridge and burying homes. The disaster, one of Japan's deadliest landslides of the postwar era, prompted tighter controls on building on steep slopes.
Johnson took over from Theresa May after winning the Conservative leadership race, a contest triggered by May's resignation over Brexit. He went on to lead the country through the Brexit negotiations and the coronavirus pandemic until 2022.
Ben Shread · OGL 3
Jennifer Lopez, born on this day in 1969, went from dancing on the sketch show In Living Color to become a singer and film star. She later became one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood.
Everwest · CC BY 4.0
Amelia Earhart came into the world in Atchison, Kansas, and went on to become one of the great early aviators, famed for crossing the Atlantic alone in 1932. She vanished over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting to fly around the globe.
Wide World Photos · Public domain
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Born in Caracas into a wealthy family, Bolívar became the leading figure in the wars that freed much of South America from Spanish rule, earning the nickname El Libertador. He is remembered as the liberator of six modern nations, including Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
Ricardo Acevedo Bernal · Public domain
Born in the Bronx, Lopez began as a Fly Girl dancer on In Living Color before becoming one of Hollywood's best-paid actresses and a chart-topping singer. She is credited with opening doors for Latino performers in film and popularising Latin pop.
Everwest · CC BY 4.0
French novelist and playwright whose serial adventures, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, made him one of France's most widely read authors. His published works ran to around 100,000 pages.
Nadar · Public domain
Martin Van Buren was the eighth US president, and a key founder of the Democratic Party alongside Andrew Jackson. He was the only president whose first language was not English, having grown up speaking Dutch in Kinderhook, New York.
Mathew Benjamin Brady / Levin Corbin Handy · Public domain
Chadwick was the British physicist who discovered the neutron in 1932, a particle with no electric charge that won him the 1935 Nobel Prize. He later led the British team on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War.
Los Alamos National Laboratory · Attribution
Polish-born writer who mostly wrote in Yiddish and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. He later turned many of his books into English himself, with help from editors, and his memoir of boyhood in Warsaw won a National Book Award.
Israel Press and Photo Agency (I.P.P.A.) photographer · CC BY 4.0
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