On this day in…
… 1947, the presidential guards outside the Elysee palace in Paris wore this.
(AFP/Getty Images)
… 1960, Salvador Dali was unveiling his work ‘The Discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus’ in New York.
(AFP/Getty Images)
… 1970, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi formally took control of Libya, four months after leading a bloodless coup against its former king.
(AFP/Getty Images)
… 1979, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi left Iran, never to return. His departure, after months of protests, set the stage for Iran's transition into the Islamic republic it is today.
(AFP/Getty Images)
… 1983, a pig named Botham (after English cricketer Ian Botham) found its way onto the pitch in Brisbane, where Australia was playing England in the Ashes cricket series.
(Adrian Murrell/Getty Images)
… 1993 in El Salvador, thousands of people were celebrating the signing of a peace treaty that ended 12 years of civil war.
(Francisco Campos/AFP/Getty Images)
… 1993, Bill Clinton was packing up his closets and leaving Little Rock, Arkansas, for Washington DC, where he would be inaugurated four days later as president of the United States.
(J. David Ake/AFP/Getty Images)
… 1995, Sarajevo was under snow and under siege in the depths of the Bosnian War.
(Fehim Demir/AFP/Getty Images)
… 2002, Argentina’s government had just defaulted on most of its public debt and abandoned the fixed exchange rate between the peso and the US dollar.
(Quique Kierszenbaum/Getty Images)
… 2003, one of the crew on the US Space Shuttle Columbia was about to take this photograph of Earth — just days before the shuttle broke apart on reentry, killing all seven people onboard.
(NASA/Getty Images)
… 2010, Port-au-Prince was in ruins, three days after the massive earthquake that destroyed entire swathes of Haiti’s capital.
(Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images)
… 2013, in foggy London, a helicopter crashed into a crane on top of a tower and killed two Brits.
(Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images)
… 2013, President Barack Obama announced proposed changes to reduce gun violence in the United States, watched by children who’d written to the White House after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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