Simón Bolívar becomes president of the Third Venezuelan Republic (1817), and Sweden becomes first EU state to recognise Palestine (2014). Born on this day: Diego Maradona, Ezra Pound and Ivanka Trump. Died: Henri Dunant, Gustav Hertz and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
31 events, 72 births and 64 deaths on this date.
Bolívar took the presidency of Venezuela's third republic, a position he held while pressing his campaign against Spanish rule. The office gave his independence drive a civil base as well as a military one.
Ricardo Acevedo Bernal · Public domainSweden formally recognised the State of Palestine, becoming the first EU member to do so. It was a diplomatic step that set Stockholm apart from its partners in the bloc, which were divided on the question.
At just seventeen, Vilhelm of Denmark stepped ashore in Athens as King George I, a young outsider picked to rule a newly independent Greece. His long reign of nearly half a century helped shape the modern Greek state.
The two countries agreed to hand their long-running frontier quarrel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It was a route to settling a dispute that had sparked open war eleven years earlier.
Pirates from the Arab and Persian worlds raided the southern Chinese port, a sign of how far maritime trade with the Middle East then reached. The attack showed the port's value to foreign traders and the risks they ran there.
The Roman emperor Hadrian founded a new Greek-style city on the Nile to honour Antinous, his young companion who had drowned in the river that year. The city was built on the site where he died and became an important centre of Greek culture in Egypt.
Marie-Lan Nguyen · Public domain
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Argentine footballer many rank among the finest ever. He captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup, scoring the "Hand of God" goal against England, and later won two Serie A titles with Napoli.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
American poet and critic who helped drive the modernist movement, shaping the early work of Eliot, Joyce and Hemingway. He also backed Mussolini's fascism and broadcast propaganda for Italy during the Second World War.
Alvin Langdon Coburn · CC0
Ivanka Trump is an American businesswoman who advised her father, Donald Trump, in the White House. Before politics she was an executive vice president of the Trump Organization and a judge on his show The Apprentice.
Andrea Hanks/Official White House Photo · Public domain
Swiss humanitarian who, after witnessing the Battle of Solferino, helped found what became the Red Cross and wrote A Memory of Solferino. He shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
Time Life Pictures · Public domain
Together with James Franck, he won the 1925 Nobel Prize for uncovering the laws that govern how an electron strikes an atom. His later career took him to East Germany and the Soviet Union.
Bain News Service, publisher · Public domain
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who argued that people in every society think in the same basic ways. His book Tristes Tropiques helped make him a central figure in structuralism, a school of thought that reached into philosophy and beyond.
UNESCO/Michel Ravassard · CC BY 3.0
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