Lincoln removes McClellan as commander of the Union's main eastern army (1862), and Armed forces raid and destroy the Māori settlement of Parihaka (1881). Born on this day: Vivien Leigh, Bryan Adams and Paul Sabatier. Died: James Clerk Maxwell, Alexis Carrel and Christiaan Eijkman.
31 events, 72 births and 71 deaths on this date.
Lincoln dismissed General George McClellan from leading the army guarding Washington after months of cautious campaigning that frustrated the president. The move reflected Lincoln's wider search for a commander willing to press the Confederacy hard.
Alexander Gardner · Public domainGovernment forces under John Bryce marched on Parihaka, a settlement whose residents followed a principle of peaceful resistance. More than 2,000 people were driven from their homes as the village was torn down, a blow in the wider fight over confiscated Māori land.
A military commission in Minnesota condemned 303 Dakota men over killings and assaults on white settlers during the 1862 uprising. President Lincoln later reduced the number, and 38 were hanged in Mankato.
Italy formally took control of Tripoli and Cyrenaica, the Ottoman provinces that now form most of Libya, after its war against the empire that began in September. The annexation ended centuries of Ottoman rule on the North African coast and set Italy on a path to colonial rule there.
Roosevelt won the 1940 election, becoming the first American president to seek and win a third term. He would lead the country through the rest of the Second World War, a break with the two-term tradition set by George Washington.
Leon Perskie · CC BY 2.0
Google showed off Android, a free, open-source operating system for mobile phones, built on the Linux kernel. It would go on to become the most widely used operating system in the world, running on billions of devices.
For the full day, download Chunks today. Every date, the stories behind them, and a new day each morning. Free to start.
Vivien Leigh was a British actress who won two Academy Awards, for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She was primarily a stage performer, admired on the London and Broadway stage across three decades.
Fawcett Publications · Public domain
Bryan Adams is a Canadian singer-songwriter whose 1991 single "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" spent sixteen weeks at number one in the UK. He is also a photographer, and has sold an estimated 75 million records or more.
Raph_PH · CC BY 2.0
French chemist who shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Victor Grignard. He was recognised for making it far easier to add hydrogen to organic compounds using metal catalysts.
Nobel Foundation · Public domain
Scottish physicist whose equations showed electricity, magnetism and light are one phenomenon, and who predicted radio waves. He died in Cambridge in 1879, aged 48.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
The French surgeon won the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for techniques of joining blood vessels, and later worked on tissue culture and organ transplants. He is also remembered for helping to drive eugenic policies in Vichy France.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Christiaan Eijkman was a Dutch physician who showed that beriberi was caused by poor diet rather than infection. His work on polished rice led to the discovery of vitamins, and he shared the 1929 Nobel Prize for it.
Unknown author Unknown author · Copyrighted free use
Download on iOS
Download on Android