After the French Revolution began, Marie-Antoinette, queen consort of Louis XVI, was targeted by agitators who, enraged by her extravagance and attempts to save the monarchy, ultimately guillotined her on this day in 1793.
| 1964: | | China, eager to join the nuclear race, successfully detonated its first atomic bomb. |
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| 1946: | | Ten of the twelve defendants sentenced to death at the Nürnberg trials were executed. |
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| 1888: | | | American dramatist Eugene O'Neill, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, was born. |
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| 1859: | | John Brown, a militant abolitionist, made his legendary raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry. |
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| 1846: | | William Thomas Green Morton first demonstrated the use of ether as a general anesthetic before a gathering of physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. |
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| 1813: | | Napoleon led his troops against an allied force of Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and Swedish troops during the Battle of Leipzig. |
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