Diocletian is chosen as Roman emperor (284), and Sadat becomes first Arab leader to visit Israel (1977). Born on this day: Joe Biden, Selma Lagerlöf and Nadine Gordimer. Died: Leo Tolstoy, Francisco Franco and Francis William Aston.
29 events, 64 births and 56 deaths on this date.
Diocletian, born Diocles to a low-status family in Dalmatia, rose through the army ranks before his troops proclaimed him emperor. He went on to stabilise a crisis-hit empire and began splitting its rule between several co-emperors.
G.dallorto · AttributionEgyptian president Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and talked with prime minister Menachem Begin. It was a bold bid for a lasting peace between the two countries, which had fought several wars.
The government and the UNITA rebels signed a peace deal in Lusaka that aimed to end nearly two decades of conflict. Fighting flared again in localised clashes the following year, showing how fragile the agreement was.
By this date, estimates put the crowd in Prague near half a million, up sharply from about 200,000 the previous day. The protests were part of the Velvet Revolution, the movement that ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia within weeks.
New Jersey became the first state to approve the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, guaranteeing free speech, religious freedom and a fair trial. Its vote came just as the new federal government was getting under way.
Four days after the first wave of attacks in Istanbul, a second set of car bombs hit the city. The blasts wrecked the Turkish headquarters of HSBC and the British consulate, killing many people and wounding hundreds more.
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Joe Biden is a Democrat who spent decades in the US Senate before becoming Barack Obama's vice president and then winning the presidency in 2020. He is best known for the American Rescue Plan, passed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Adam Schultz · Public domain
Swedish novelist whose debut, Gösta Berling's Saga, appeared when she was 33. In 1909 she became the first female winner of the Nobel literature award.
Atelier Jaeger · Public domain
South African novelist who wrote about apartheid and racial injustice, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She also joined the African National Congress when it was banned and advised Nelson Mandela on his 1964 defence speech.
Boberger . Photo: Bengt Oberger · CC BY 3.0
Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, long regarded as among the greatest novels ever written. Later in life he became a Christian anarchist whose ideas of nonviolent resistance shaped Gandhi and later campaigners.
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii · Public domain
Francisco Franco was the Spanish general who ruled Spain as dictator from 1939 until his death. He rose to power by leading the Nationalists to victory in the Spanish Civil War, and his rule lasted nearly four decades.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC0
Aston was a British physicist and chemist who built the mass spectrograph, a device that separates atoms by weight. With it he found that many elements that do not decay naturally come in several forms, called isotopes, which earned him the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
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