Pope John Paul II visits Romania (1999), and Military coup ousts Guinea-Bissau's president João Bernardo Vieira (1999). Born on this day: Rabindranath Tagore, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Johannes Brahms. Died: Caspar David Friedrich, Antonio Salieri and Willard Boyle.
31 events, 55 births and 65 deaths on this date.
John Paul II became the first pope to travel to a largely Orthodox nation since the split between Rome and Constantinople in 1054. His trip to Romania was a rare step toward reconciliation between the two churches.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY 3.0 plGuinea-Bissau's armed forces toppled President João Bernardo Vieira, who had ruled the West African state for most of the past two decades. The coup came during a civil conflict that had split the army, and it left the country under a military-backed transitional government.
Putin was sworn in as Russia's president after acting in the role since Boris Yeltsin resigned months earlier. He would go on to dominate Russian politics for the next quarter-century.
Alexander Popov showed the Russian Physical and Chemical Society a simple device that could pick up electrical discharges from storms. It was an early radio receiver, and some former Soviet regions still mark the anniversary as Radio Day.
The Ottomans handed over Bukovina, a region in today's Ukraine and Romania, to the Habsburgs under the Convention of Constantinople. It was the first Ottoman territory the Habsburgs gained in the Balkans region since the Ottomans began losing ground there.
French colonists, led by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, established the settlement on a bend of the Mississippi River. It went on to become the territorial capital of French Louisiana and remains the state's largest city.
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Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, writer and composer whose work reshaped Bengali literature and music. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize, for Gitanjali, and he wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
Generalstabens litografiska anstalt · Public domain
Russian composer whose works, including Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Eugene Onegin, became some of the most loved in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer to make a lasting impression abroad.
Nikolai Kuznetsov · Public domain
Remembered for his four symphonies and his many songs, this Hamburg-born composer was also a touring pianist and conductor. He wrote in older forms with rich, restless harmony, and he never married.
C. Brasch , Berlin ( biography ) · Public domain
Friedrich was a German Romantic painter who placed small, quiet figures against vast skies, mist and ruined Gothic arches. His work fell out of favour late in life, and he died largely forgotten before the early twentieth century revived it.
Johann Karl Bähr · Public domain
Salieri was an Italian composer who dominated Italian-language opera in Vienna and taught many of the era's leading musicians, including Beethoven and Schubert. Today he is best known to many through the fictionalised portrayal of him in Peter Shaffer's play and film Amadeus.
Joseph Willibrord Mähler · Public domain
Willard Boyle was a Canadian physicist who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for co-inventing the charge-coupled device, the sensor behind many digital cameras. He also helped choose lunar landing sites for the Apollo programme.
Prolineserver ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0
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