Columbus sights the island later called Puerto Rico (1493), and UN weapons inspectors arrive in Iraq (2002). Born on this day: Margaret Atwood, Qaboos bin Said and Louis Daguerre. Died: Marcel Proust, Niels Bohr and Chester A. Arthur.
33 events, 72 births and 56 deaths on this date.
On his second voyage, Columbus came across the island that would become Puerto Rico, a stop on his continuing sweep through the Caribbean. Its Taíno inhabitants and rich land soon drew Spanish settlers, shaping the island's colonial future.
Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio · Public domainChristopher ColumbusHear the story in ChunksHans Blix's team reached Iraq to check whether Saddam Hussein's government had given up its banned weapons, a central step in the disarmament crisis. The mission was an early test of whether the Security Council could enforce its demands on Baghdad.
Latvia broke away from the Russian Empire at the close of the First World War, ending centuries of rule by Germans, Swedes, Poles and Russians. The new republic was short-lived in its first form, but the 1918 declaration became the foundation for Latvia's later independence.
Railway companies in the United States and Canada began running on four standard zones, replacing the many local times towns had kept. That scheme helped shape the time zones most countries use today.
Minecraft, the sandbox game made by Swedish studio Mojang, left its testing phase with a full launch on personal computers. It later became the best-selling video game of all time, with over 400 million copies sold.
After more than a century of construction, the new St. Peter's Basilica was formally dedicated in Rome, replacing the fourth-century church built by Constantine. Work had begun under Pope Julius II, and the building's design passed through the hands of Bramante, Michelangelo and Maderno.
Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Canadian novelist and poet best known for The Handmaid's Tale, a 1985 dystopia in which a society strips women of their rights. She has won two Booker Prizes and is also credited with inventing the LongPen, a device for writing documents remotely.
Collision Conf · CC BY 2.0
Qaboos ruled Oman for almost fifty years after deposing his father in a 1970 coup backed by Britain. He used the throne to modernise a country that had been largely isolated, ending the Dhofar rebellion and introducing a constitution.
Foreign Ministry of Oman · OGL-om 1.0
Daguerre was a French painter and chemist who invented the daguerreotype, an early photographic process that produced a single image on a silver-coated copper plate. He is often counted among the fathers of photography.
Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot · Public domain
Marcel Proust was a French novelist whose sprawling work In Search of Lost Time, built around memory and involuntary recollection, is considered one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. He died in Paris, having spent his final years revising its volumes while largely confined to his bedroom by asthma.
Otto Wegener · Public domain
Danish physicist who worked out how electrons sit in orbits around an atom's nucleus, earning the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics. He also argued that objects can show contradictory properties, such as acting as both waves and particles, depending on how they are studied.
The American Institute of Physics credits the photo [1] to AB Lagrelius & Westphal , which is the Swedish company used by the Nobel Foundation for most photos of its book series Les Prix Nobel . · Public domain
Arthur, the 21st president, took office after Garfield's assassination and surprised many by championing civil service reform, ending the spoils system. He died in New York City in 1886, having risen from a Vermont childhood to the White House.
Abraham Bogardus / Adam Cuerden · Public domain
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