Lincoln signs act banning slavery in US territories (1862), and Mussolini arrested in Bern for advocating violent general strike (1903). Born on this day: Blaise Pascal, Aung San Suu Kyi and Boris Johnson. Died: William Golding, James Gandolfini and J.M. Barrie.
29 events, 70 births and 58 deaths on this date.
The law banned slavery across every federal territory, both those already held and any created later. It undid much of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which had opened the territories to slavery.
Alexander Gardner · Public domainBefore he led Italy's fascist regime, Mussolini was a firebrand socialist agitator living in Switzerland. Bern police arrested him for urging a violent nationwide strike.
In Rome, the pope declared 117 Vietnamese Catholics saints, most of them executed in the nineteenth century for refusing to renounce their faith. It was the first canonisation of the Vietnamese martyrs, honouring Christians from a country where the Church had long faced persecution.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY 3.0 pl
Assange sought refuge inside Ecuador's embassy in London, fearing he would be sent to the United States. The request followed WikiLeaks publishing classified documents, among them a video of a 2007 Baghdad strike that killed civilians, and he stayed there until 2019.
Loyal troops under Bardas Phokas the Younger beat the rebel army of Bardas Skleros in a battle that helped keep the young Basil II on the throne. The civil war dragged on for more than a decade before Skleros finally submitted.
Bishops gathered at Nicaea agreed a short statement of Christian belief, which later became the core of a creed recited in many churches today. It grew out of disputes over the nature of Jesus, a question that divided the early church.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
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Pascal was a French mathematician and inventor who built one of the first mechanical calculators. He is also remembered for his probability work with Fermat and for the Pensées, his unfinished collection of religious reflections.
Gérard Edelinck · CC BY-SA 4.0
Born in Rangoon, she became the best-known voice for democracy in Myanmar, spending years under house arrest before winning the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. She later led the government as State Counsellor from 2016 until the military seized power in 2021.
Cabinet Public Relations Office of the Cabinet Secretariat · CC BY 4.0
Boris Johnson is a former editor of The Spectator who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 2019. He is remembered for a prominent role in the 2016 EU referendum campaign and for reopening Brexit talks with the EU as prime minister.
Ben Shread · OGL 3
British novelist who wrote Lord of the Flies, a 1954 story of boys stranded on an island that turned civilised behaviour into savagery. He later won the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl
James Gandolfini was an American actor best known for playing the mafia boss Tony Soprano in HBO's The Sopranos, a role that earned him three Primetime Emmy Awards. He died suddenly in Rome at 51, while on holiday.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff · CC BY 2.0
Scottish novelist and playwright who created Peter Pan, the 1904 stage play about a boy who refuses to grow up. Before he died, he signed over ownership of the play to a London children's hospital, which still benefits from it.
Herbert Rose Barraud · Public domain
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