Gabriel García Márquez is born in Aracataca, Colombia (1927), and Georgy Malenkov becomes Soviet premier after Stalin's death (1953). Born on this day: Michelangelo, Gabriel García Márquez and Valentina Tereshkova. Died: Pearl S. Buck, Nancy Reagan and Hans Bethe.
33 events, 75 births and 80 deaths on this date.
Born in the town of Aracataca, Colombia, he later drew on it for Macondo, the imagined village at the heart of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and helped make magic realism famous worldwide.
Gorup de Besanez · CC BY-SA 4.0A day after Joseph Stalin died, Georgy Malenkov took over as head of the Soviet government, starting a contest for power. Stalin had led the Soviet Union since the 1920s, shaping it into a one-party state marked by purges and forced industrialisation.
Cassius Clay, the boxer who had just won the heavyweight title, now announced he would be known as Muhammad Ali. He rejected his birth name, which he saw as a relic of slavery, and took a name chosen for his Nation of Islam faith.
Ira Rosenberg · Public domain
Captives taken when Amorium fell in 838 were put to death in Samarra after refusing to abandon Christianity for Islam. The killings became a lasting grievance in Byzantine memory of the Abbasid wars.
Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor, reigning from 1888 until his abdication in 1918, and his fall brought the German Empire to an end. The would-be assassin was an anarchist, and the attack was aimed at the Emperor himself.
Studio of Thomas Heinrich Voigt · Public domain
Huge crowds filled streets in many countries on the same day, demanding relief from joblessness during the economic slump. The marches were called by the Communist International, the Moscow-based body that promoted revolutionary socialism worldwide.
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Michelangelo carved the marble David and the Pietà before he turned thirty, then painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling despite calling himself no painter. Later, in his seventies, he took over the design of St Peter's Basilica in Rome.
Attributed to Daniele da Volterra · Public domain
Colombian novelist who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and helped popularise magic realism, a style blending the fantastical with everyday life. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
Gorup de Besanez · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she flew solo on Vostok 6 in 1963, orbiting Earth 48 times. She was a textile worker and amateur skydiver before joining the Soviet space programme, and later served in parliament.
duma.gov.ru · CC BY 4.0
Pearl S. Buck was an American novelist raised in China, best remembered for The Good Earth, which won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1938 she became the first US woman honoured with the Nobel literature prize.
Unknown (see print without name · Public domain
Nancy Reagan, a former Hollywood actress, became the most visible face of the Reagan White House. She is remembered for the Just Say No anti-drug campaign she championed, which drew criticism for its effect on poorer communities.
Official White House photographer · Public domain
Hans Bethe was a German-American physicist who worked out how stars like the Sun produce energy through a chain of nuclear reactions, earning the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. He also led theoretical work at Los Alamos on the first atomic bombs and later campaigned against nuclear testing.
Los Alamos National Laboratory · Attribution
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