Martin Luther entered the world in the small mining town of Eisleben, in the Holy Roman Empire. Raised in a strict household under his father Hans, a former miner turned smelter operator, Luther was pushed toward law before abandoning it for theology. Three decades later his objections to Church practice, especially the sale of indulgences, would ignite the Protestant Reformation and permanently divide European Christianity.
On September 10, 1509, a massive earthquake estimated above magnitude 7 struck Constantinople, collapsing over a thousand buildings, breaching sections of the city's ancient walls, and killing thousands. Ottoman chroniclers dubbed it the Kucuk Kiyamet, or Lesser Judgment Day. Sultan Bayezid II mobilized thousands of workers for reconstruction, and the disaster reshaped urban planning in the Ottoman capital for a generation.
Meeting at Tun Tavern, the Second Continental Congress ordered the raising of two battalions of Marines to serve with the fledgling Continental Navy. Samuel Nicholas took command as the Corps' first officer. The date is still celebrated annually as the Marine Corps birthday, marked by cake-cutting ceremonies and the traditional toast to fallen comrades.
On November 10, 1989, crowds swarmed the Berlin Wall in numbers even larger than the chaotic opening night before, hacking off chunks of concrete as souvenirs while East German border guards, overwhelmed and undirected, largely let them pass. Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl addressed cheering crowds near the Reichstag. The scenes, broadcast worldwide, became the defining images of the Cold War's end, a year before formal German reunification.
In the days surrounding November 10, 2010, Myanmar's long-ruling military junta staged an election widely condemned as rigged, even as speculation mounted that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate held under house arrest for 15 of the previous 21 years, would soon be released. Her eventual freeing days later signaled a cautious, tightly managed opening after decades of military rule, though genuine democratic reform remained years away.