Catherine the Great endorses plans for a Foundling Home in Moscow (1763), and Oppenheimer and Snyder publish model of black hole collapse (1939). Born on this day: Zendaya, Annie Ernaux and Roh Moo-Hyun. Died: Louis XIV, François Mauriac and Adrian IV.
34 events, 74 births and 61 deaths on this date.
Catherine the Great backed Ivan Betskoy's scheme to care for abandoned children in Moscow, a project aimed at taking in infants that families could not keep. Betskoy, a leading Enlightenment reformer, drew on ideas from across Europe to build the institution.
After Alexander Roslin · Public domainOppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder published a model showing how a massive star could collapse into a black hole. It was the first rigorous treatment of this process in modern physics, and it laid groundwork for later black hole research.
Aged just five, the boy inherited the throne from his great-grandfather Louis XIV, whose seventy-two-year reign was the longest in French history. Philippe, Duke of Orléans, governed as regent until Louis came of age in 1723.
Harding spotted it in the asteroid belt and named it after the Roman goddess Juno. It was the third asteroid ever found, is one of the largest rocky ones, and is thought to hold about 1% of the belt's total mass.
VSO Very Large Telescope SPHERE/ZIMPOL team · CC BY-SA 4.0
Monteverdi's sacred work, the Vespers for the Blessed Virgin, came off the press in Venice for the first time. The volume was dedicated to Pope Paul V, a notable gesture from a church musician working in the Venetian Republic.
Bernardo Strozzi · Public domain
After years of heavy fighting in western Iraq, American troops formally returned security responsibility for Anbar Province to Iraq's own armed forces. The handover marked a shift toward Iraqi control as the US presence there was scaled back.
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American actress and singer best known for playing Rue Bennett in the HBO drama Euphoria, which earned her two Primetime Emmy Awards. She is also remembered for her Marvel role as Michelle Jones-Watson in the Spider-Man films.
PhilipRomano · CC BY-SA 4.0
French writer and former teacher whose mostly autobiographical books examine class, sex and memory. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, and she is still living.
Frankie Fouganthin · CC BY-SA 4.0
Roh Moo-hyun was a human rights lawyer who rose from student activism to become South Korea's ninth president, serving from 2003 to 2008. He was the first South Korean president born after Japanese rule ended, and he is remembered for a conciliatory approach towards North Korea.
대한민국 국가기록원 · KOGL Type 1
Louis XIV, the Sun King, died at Versailles after ruling France for seventy-two years, the longest reign of any monarch in recorded history. He built a centralised state around his palace and left France the leading power in Europe.
Hyacinthe Rigaud · Public domain
French novelist whose stories of provincial Catholic families, guilt and buried passions earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952. He was also a sharp political columnist and a member of the Académie française.
Studio Harcourt · Public domain
Adrian IV, born Nicholas Breakspear, was the only pope born in England. He rose from an English-born abbot to lead the Catholic Church, and died in Anagni in 1159.
Public domain
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