Accused of selling military secrets to Germany and convicted in an irregular trial against a backdrop of anti-Semitism, French officer Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned this day in 1895 on Devils Island, off French Guiana.
| 2002: | | The military coup that a day before had installed businessman Pedro Carmona Estanga as interim president of Venezuela collapsed this day, and the following morning Hugo Chávez was restored to the presidency. |
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| 1943: | | | The Thomas Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in East Potomac Park on the south bank of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. |
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| 1941: | | Japan concluded a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union in World War II. |
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| 1909: | | American short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty, whose work is mainly focused with great precision on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her own birthplace and the Delta country, was born. |
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| 1906: | | | Nobel Prize-winning playwright and critic Samuel Beckett is believed to have been born this day in Ireland. |
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| 1640: | | King Charles I of England convened the Short Parliament, the first to be summoned in 11 years. |
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| 1598: | | | King Henry IV of France promulgated the Edict of Nantes in Brittany, granting a large measure of religious liberty to his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots. |
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