On this day

In 1755, the British governor, General Charles Lawrence, and the Governing Council of Nova Scotia deported the Acadians living in the British Maritime Provinces. Known as the Great Expulsion and Le Grand Dérangement, this act of ethnic cleansing occurred during and was prompted by the French and Indian or Seven Years War. The cleansing killed some, destroyed families and moved the deportees to ports in Britain, France and Britain's American colonies.

In 1834, the English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge died I Highgate, England.

In 1894, Gavrilo Princip was born in Obljaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary. Princip was a Yugoslavian nationalist and the Archduke Ferdinand's assassin. The assassination triggered the First World War.

In 1905, the writer and Nobel Lauriat Elias Canetti was born in Rustschuk, Bulgaria.

In 1943, the Fascist Grand Council forced Benito Mussolini out of office. The soldier and fascist politician Pietro Badoglio replaced Il Duce.

In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb under water at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The explosion was part of a series of tests known as Operation Crossroads. The United States cleansed the relevant test areas of their aboriginal population.

In 1952, the American colony of Puerto Rico adopted a local constitution. The United States had approved of the constitution and retained Puerto Rico as a colony.

In 1957, Tunisia became a republic.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in a divided Berlin.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon pronounced his Nixon Doctrine on the American colony of Guam. The Doctrine was intended to be a general position of the United States, but it also put into effect the "Vietnamization" of the Viet Nam War.