1498 ~ On his third voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus became the first European to discover the island of Trinidad.

1556 ~ Death of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits

1703 ~ Daniel Defoe was placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel after publishing a politically satirical pamphlet.

1803 ~ Birthday of John Ericsson, Swedish inventor and engineer.

1886 ~ Death of Franz Liszt, Composer.

1912 ~ Birthday of Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics

1917 ~ The Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) started in Flanders. With casualties from both sides exceeding 550,000, the name Passcheddaele has come to be used as a synonym for pointless slaughter.

"...I died in Hell
(they called it Passchendaele) my wound was slight
and I was hobbling back; and then a shell
burst slick upon the duckboards; so I fell
into the bottomless mud, and lost the light"
Siegfried Sassoon

1945 ~ Pierre Laval, fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrendered to Allied soldiers in Austria.

1971 ~ Apollo program: Apollo 15 astronauts became the first to ride in a lunar rover.

2001 ~ Death of Poul Anderson, science fiction author.

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Eudaimonia