Shimla, Feb. 10
2014
American actress and diplomat Shirley Temple—who cheered Depression-era moviegoers when she was a dimple-cheeked curly-haired child star and the top Hollywood box-office attraction from 1935 to 1939—died in California.
2005
Arthur Miller—who was recognized as one of the most important playwrights of the mid-20th century, perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Death of a Salesman—died in Connecticut.
1990
The spacecraft Galileo flew past Venus on its way to Jupiter.
1962
U.S. airman Francis Gary Powers, captured pilot of the U-2 plane downed by the Soviet Union in 1960, was exchanged for jailed Soviet informant Rudolf Abel.
1957
American author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the popular Little House series of children’s books, died.
1939
The American film classic Stagecoach, widely considered to be the first “adult” western, had its world premiere; one of director John Ford’s defining movies, it also elevated John Wayne to stardom.
1898
German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes, was born in Augsburg.
1846
The British conquered the Sikhs in northwestern India in the Battle of Sobraon, the most decisive engagement of the First Sikh War.
1837
Russian author Aleksandr Pushkin was killed in a duel defending his wife’s honour.
1763
The Treaty of Paris was signed, ending territorial conflicts between France and Britain in the Seven Years’ War, the North American phase of which was called the French and Indian War.
