Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1994), and Tsar Peter the Great founds St Petersburg (1703). Born on this day: Ibn Khaldūn, Henry Kissinger and Christopher Lee. Died: Jawaharlal Nehru, Robert Koch and John Calvin.
31 events, 60 births and 43 deaths on this date.
After two decades in exile in the West, the writer whose Gulag history had exposed Soviet prison camps returned to Russia on this day in 1994. He came back to a country that was still reckoning with the past he had documented.
Bert Verhoeff for Anefo · CC0Peter the Great raised the city on a Swedish fortress he had captured, naming it after the apostle Saint Peter. For two centuries it was the Russian capital, until the Bolsheviks shifted government to Moscow after the 1917 revolution.
Its main span was the longest of any suspension bridge when it opened, carrying traffic across the strait between San Francisco and Marin. It remains one of the most recognised symbols of California.
Rich Niewiroski Jr. · CC BY 2.5
Alexander III was crowned in Moscow, formally taking the throne his father had held before him. He went on to reverse many of Alexander II's liberal reforms, and his reign is remembered for avoiding major wars.
Sergey Lvovich Levitsky · Public domain
John, the youngest son of Henry II, took the English throne after his brother Richard I's death, and would later lose most of the Angevin lands in France. His reign ended with the barons forcing Magna Carta on him.
British – School Details on Google Art Project · Public domain
The justices unanimously ruled that the central New Deal law giving the government wide powers over industry overstepped the Constitution. Its rejection of the scheme was a sharp blow to Franklin Roosevelt's recovery programme.
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The Tunisian scholar who wrote the Muqaddimah, an introduction to history that analysed how societies rise and fall. Many historians count him among the first to study society in a systematic way, long before the modern social sciences existed.
Reda Kerbush · CC BY-SA 4.0
Born in Germany, he fled Nazi persecution as a Jewish refugee and became a leading American diplomat. As secretary of state under Nixon and Ford, he opened relations with China and shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.
U.S. Department of State from United States · Public domain
Christopher Lee was an English actor whose deep, commanding voice made him the screen's most memorable villain. He is best remembered for playing Count Dracula in seven Hammer Horror films, and later as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings.
Manfred Werner - Tsui · CC BY-SA 3.0
Nehru was India's first prime minister after independence in 1947, and he led the country for sixteen years. He also wrote widely read books, including An Autobiography and The Discovery of India, which still reach readers far beyond his homeland.
Keystone View Company/FPG · Public domain
German physician who identified the bacteria behind tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax, helping establish that germs cause disease. His methods for growing bacteria in the laboratory shaped modern medicine and public health.
Wilhelm Fechner · Public domain
John Calvin was a French theologian and pastor whose ideas on predestination and God's sovereignty became the basis of Calvinism. He spent much of his life reforming the church in Geneva, and his Institutes of the Christian Religion remained hugely influential.
Portrait_john_calvin.jpg : Anonymous · Public domain
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