Roosevelt becomes first sitting US president to travel abroad on official trip (1906), and Ambrose Burnside takes command of the Union Army of the Potomac (1862). Born on this day: Carl Sagan, Ivan Turgenev and Edward VII. Died: Charles de Gaulle, Neville Chamberlain and Ibn Saud.
29 events, 64 births and 48 deaths on this date.
Roosevelt sailed to Panama to see how work on the canal was progressing, a journey no serving president had made before. It showed how much importance he placed on the project linking the Atlantic and Pacific.
Adam Cuerden · Public domainReplacing George McClellan, Burnside took charge of the main Union army in Virginia during the Civil War. He would soon lead it into a costly defeat at Fredericksburg, though that was still ahead.
The Polish government-in-exile honoured the city with the Virtuti Militari, Poland's oldest and highest military decoration. The award recognised Warsaw's resistance during the German bombing and siege of 1939, when the city held out against overwhelming odds.
Kentucky officers crossed into Indiana and took the minister Calvin Fairbank back across the river to face charges of aiding an enslaved person's escape. His seizure showed how far Southern authorities would reach into free states to pursue such cases.
Frederick I, the Bohemian king, fled Prague for Vratislav, the city now known as Wrocław, a day after his army lost the Battle of White Mountain. The flight marked the collapse of his short-lived reign over Bohemia.
The government of the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic made its tricolour of blue, red and green the national flag. Independent Azerbaijan revived the same design in 1991, with minor changes, and still flies it today.
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Carl Sagan became one of the best-known scientists of his era through the Cosmos television series, which he co-wrote and narrated in 1980. He was an astronomer and planetary scientist who also wrote bestselling books and a novel, Contact, that became a film.
NASA/JPL · Public domain
Russian novelist and short story writer whose collection A Sportsman's Sketches helped establish Russian realism. His novel Fathers and Sons is still counted among the great works of nineteenth-century fiction.
Ilya Repin · Public domain
Edward VII was the eldest son of Queen Victoria and spent almost sixty years as heir before ruling as king from 1901 to 1910. Known for his love of society and the arts, he was later nicknamed the Peacemaker for easing ties with France.
W. & D. Downey · Public domain
Charles de Gaulle, the French general who refused to accept his country's armistice with Germany, died at his home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. He led the Free French Forces in the Second World War and later founded the Fifth Republic, serving as its first president.
The National Archives UK · No restrictions
Neville Chamberlain was British prime minister when he signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, ceding Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. He is remembered as the leading face of appeasement, a policy that did not stop the Second World War he led Britain into.
Lafayette Ltd · Public domain
Ibn Saud was a Najdi war leader who conquered most of central and northern Arabia, then became the first King of Saudi Arabia in 1932. He fathered many children, and his descendants have ruled the kingdom ever since.
Lcxzdf56 ( talk · contribs ) · Public domain
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