Roosevelt signs the Federal Credit Union Act (1934), and RAF bombing wrongly hits neutral San Marino (1944). Born on this day: Ariana Grande, Pearl S. Buck and Salvador Allende. Died: Francisco Pizarro, Karl Landsteiner and George IV.
32 events, 62 births and 75 deaths on this date.
Franklin Roosevelt signed a law letting groups of people form member-owned credit unions, setting up a federal charter for them. The institutions, run cooperatively by their members, went on to become a major source of savings and loans for ordinary Americans.
Leon Perskie · CC BY 2.0Acting on faulty intelligence, RAF bombers struck the tiny republic of San Marino, which had stayed out of the war. About 35 civilians were killed, a grim error in a country that had no part in the fighting.
Madagascar became a sovereign state on this day, ending nearly six decades of French colonial rule that had begun with annexation in 1897. The island's long isolation from the African mainland had left it with plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth.
Elvis Presley's last live show came seven weeks before he died, closing a career that had made him the King of Rock and Roll. He had started at Sun Records in 1954 and was 42 when he died that August.
RCA Records · Public domain
The Council of Pisa hoped to end the Western Schism by choosing a single new pope. Instead, its choice, Alexander V, gave the Church a third claimant alongside the rivals in Rome and Avignon.
Pope Paul VI elevated the Archbishop of Kraków to the College of Cardinals, a step toward the papacy Wojtyła would hold from 1978. The one-time stage actor and theologian later became the first non-Italian pope in four centuries.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY 3.0 pl
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American singer, songwriter and actress known for her four-octave range reaching into the whistle register. She rose to fame playing Cat Valentine on the Nickelodeon series Victorious before becoming one of the best-selling pop artists of her generation.
Barbie Simons · CC BY 3.0
Raised in China as a missionary's daughter, Buck drew on that life in her novels. Her novel The Good Earth won a Pulitzer, and in 1938 she became the first American woman honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Unknown (see print without name · Public domain
Salvador Allende was a Chilean physician turned socialist politician who became president in 1970 after winning a contested vote in Congress. He is remembered for his commitment to democracy and for trying to build socialism through elections rather than revolution.
Bernard Gotfryd · Public domain
Spanish conquistador who toppled the Inca Empire after seizing its emperor, Atahualpa, at Cajamarca in 1532. He was later assassinated by political rivals in a power struggle over Peru.
Amable-Paul Coutan · Public domain
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian-American physician whose 1901 classification of human blood groups made safe transfusions possible. He also won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that work.
Bachrach Studios · Public domain
George IV was king of the United Kingdom and Hanover, and a lavish patron of architecture and the arts, commissioning the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. He is remembered for an extravagant, scandal-filled reign that dented the monarchy's reputation with the public.
Thomas Lawrence · Public domain
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