Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck is born (1599), and Bus crash in Kitampo, Ghana, kills at least 50 (2019). Born on this day: Robert Millikan, Reese Witherspoon and William I. Died: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Tange Kenzō.
31 events, 74 births and 46 deaths on this date.
Anthony van Dyck, the seventh child of a wealthy Antwerp silk merchant, painted from an early age and went on to become the leading court painter in England. His portraits of Charles I and the aristocracy shaped English portrait-painting for more than 150 years.
Anthony van Dyck · Public domainTwo buses collided near Kitampo, north of Accra, leaving at least 50 people dead. Kitampo sits in Ghana, a West African country on the Gulf of Guinea.
Seven states, including Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, came together in Cairo to create a regional body for the Arab world. Its aim was to coordinate policy, protect members' sovereignty and settle disputes between them, and it still operates today with 22 members.
Officials in the Roman province of Arabia Petraea adopted a new calendar, the Bostran era, named after the city of Bostra. It gave the province its own way of counting years.
Austrian troops under Radetzky crushed the army of Piedmont-Sardinia, which had tried to drive them out of northern Italy. The defeat ended the war and pushed King Charles Albert to abdicate, shaping the path toward Italian unification.
Ferdinand II of Aragon, co-ruler of Spain with Isabella I, appointed Amerigo Vespucci as chief navigator, putting the Florentine explorer in charge of training pilots and checking charts for the empire's ocean voyages. The post gave Spain a central authority over navigation at the height of its exploration of the Americas.
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Robert Millikan was an American experimental physicist who measured the electric charge of a single electron. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923 and helped turn Caltech into a leading research institution.
Unknown (Mondadori Publishers) · Public domain
Reese Witherspoon is an American actress and producer, best known for playing Elle Woods in Legally Blonde and June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, which won her an Academy Award. Through her company Hello Sunshine, she now produces literary adaptations for film and television.
dtstuff9 · CC BY-SA 2.0
Wilhelm I ruled Prussia from 1861 and became the first emperor of a unified Germany in 1871, working closely with Otto von Bismarck. He died in 1888, the so-called year of three emperors.
Wilhelm Kuntzemüller · Public domain
Goethe was a German writer, scientist and theatre manager whose work, from the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther to the dramatic poem Faust, shaped German literature. He died in Weimar at eighty-two, having been a central figure in the city's cultural life for decades.
Joseph Karl Stieler · Public domain
Italian-born, Lully became a French subject and the leading figure of French Baroque music at the court of Louis XIV. He wrote operas and comédie-ballets with Molière, including Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.
Ducarme · Public domain
Japanese architect who rebuilt postwar Hiroshima, designing its Peace Memorial Park, and later won the Pritzker Prize in 1987. He died in Tokyo, aged 91, still designing buildings until the end.
Hans van Dijk for Anefo · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl
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