The North African country of Morocco, situated directly across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, proclaimed independence from France this day in 1956, with the sultan Muhammad V forming its first government.
| 1962: | | | American basketball player Wilt Chamberlain scored a record 100 points in a National Basketball Association (NBA) game. |
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| 1930: | | | English novelist D.H. Lawrence died in Vence, France (his ashes were moved in 1935 to Taos, New Mexico, where he once had lived). |
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| 1917: | | | The Jones Act took effect, designating Puerto Rico as a territory of the United States, “organized but unincorporated,” and conferring U.S. citizenship collectively on Puerto Ricans. |
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| 1900: | | | Composer Kurt Weill, who created a revolutionary kind of opera of sharp social satire in collaboration with the writer Bertolt Brecht, was born in Germany. |
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| 1867: | | | Over U.S. President Andrew Johnson's veto, Radical Republicans in Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, forbidding the president to remove civil officers without senatorial consent. |
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| 1865: | | | Confederate forces under General Jubal A. Early suffered a decisive defeat that ended Southern resistance in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, during the American Civil War, and the Confederacy collapsed the following month. |
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| 1498: | | Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama and his fleet reached the island of Mozambique on their first voyage to India. |
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