Events: In 1894, a French officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was arrested on a charge of treason; in 1964 Leonid Brezhnev replaced Nikita Khrushchev as General Secretary of the Communist Party in Russia.
Births: Virgil, Roman poet, Andes, near Mantua, Italy, 70 BC; Evangelista Torricelli, designer of the barometer, Faenza, Italy, 1608; Allan Ramsay, poet, Crawford, Strathclyde, 1686; Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher, Roken, Germany, 1844; Marie Stopes, birth control pioneer, Edinburgh, 1880; Sir Pelham (P.G.) Wodehouse, humorous writer, Guildford, Surrey, 1881.
Deaths: Gilbert A. Becket, dramatist and comic writer, London, 1891; Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy Government, 1942-44, executed in Paris, 1945; Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, committed suicide in Nuremberg, 1946; Cole Porter, songwriter, California, 1964; James McAuley, poet, Hobart, 1976.