Hernán Cortés enters Tenochtitlán, welcomed by Moctezuma (1519), and More than 10,000 US troops besiege Fallujah in Iraq (2004). Born on this day: Alain Delon, Kazuo Ishiguro and Edmond Halley. Died: John Milton, Ivan Bunin and Vyacheslav Molotov.
34 events, 63 births and 68 deaths on this date.
Cortés and his men were received with lavish ceremony by the Aztec ruler in the capital, a meeting that would soon turn to conquest. The welcome masked deep tensions that later erupted into war and the fall of the empire.
Unknown artist Unknown artist · Public domainOver 10,000 American soldiers, joined by a smaller force of Iraqi soldiers, moved against Fallujah, a city held by insurgents. The assault aimed to drive them out during the Iraq War.
A new Greek translation of the Gospels, written in demotic, the everyday spoken language, set off the clashes. Protests in the city turned bloody, with fighting spreading through the streets.
Edward Brooke, a former Massachusetts attorney general, won a seat in the US Senate, becoming the first Black American elected to the chamber since Reconstruction. He was the first Black senator to win election by popular vote, a change that followed the 1913 constitutional amendment.
Montana joined the Union as the 41st state after a gold strike and federal land grants drew a flood of American settlers. Mining around Butte and Helena would long drive its economy, and it is still called Big Sky Country.
Working with electricity, Röntgen found a previously unknown form of radiation that he could detect and produce. The rays later took his name, and in 1901 he became the first Nobel laureate in Physics.
Erwin Hanfstaengl · Public domain
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French actor who became one of Europe's biggest film stars from the late 1950s, known for Purple Noon and Le Samouraï. He also added a spoken line to the 1973 hit 'Paroles, paroles', sung with Dalida.
Reporters Associati & Archivi\Mondadori · Public domain
Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-British novelist who won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Born in Nagasaki, he moved to Britain as a child and became known for quiet, melancholy novels about memory and loss.
Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl · CC BY 2.5
Halley is remembered for working out that a comet seen in 1682 would return, which it did in 1758 after his death. He also backed the printing of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, and became the second Astronomer Royal.
Richard Phillips · Public domain
Milton was an English poet and civil servant best remembered for Paradise Lost, his epic retelling of the fall of Adam and Eve. He also wrote Areopagitica, a sharp argument against censorship that still gets quoted in defences of free speech.
anonymous · Public domain
Ivan Bunin was a Russian writer and poet, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933. He is remembered for his precise prose, the short novels The Village and Dry Valley, and his exile in France after the revolution.
Georgi Vasilievich Trunov · Public domain
Molotov was a senior Soviet figure under Stalin and foreign minister for much of the period. He is best remembered for signing the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, and the Molotov cocktail was named after him.
G. Weil for TASS · Public domain
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