Believed to have occurred around May 1373, Julian's revelations came during an illness so severe her family thought she was dying. She recovered and spent decades writing and revising 'Revelations of Divine Love,' a work of profound theological reflection that survives as the earliest surviving book in the English language known to have been written by a woman.

After seizing the Bounty from Captain William Bligh in 1789, the mutineers searched for a refuge safe from the Royal Navy's reach. They found Pitcairn, misplaced on British charts by several degrees of longitude, and burned their ship to avoid detection. Their descendants still inhabit the island today, making it one of the world's smallest and most isolated communities.

Convicted of treason by the National Convention, Louis XVI was driven through Paris in a closed carriage and mounted the scaffold in the Place de la Révolution. Drummers drowned out his final words to the crowd. His execution shocked European monarchies and hardened their resolve to crush the Revolution by force, plunging France into years of war.

Weakened by a series of strokes since 1922, Lenin had already been sidelined from active governance when he died at his dacha outside Moscow. His body was embalmed and placed on permanent display in a mausoleum on Red Square, a shrine that still draws visitors a century later. His death set off a bitter succession contest that Stalin ultimately won.

Byrd's second Antarctic expedition, spanning 1933 to 1935, used aircraft and advanced radio equipment to survey enormous stretches of previously unmapped territory. The mission expanded American scientific presence on the continent and captured public imagination through radio broadcasts beamed directly from the ice to audiences in the United States.

Ali, having declared his refusal to fight in Vietnam on religious grounds as a Nation of Islam minister, was engaged in a legal battle over his draft classification during this period. His eventual refusal to step forward for induction that April would lead to a felony conviction, stripped titles, and a three-year exile from boxing before the Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971.

Five years after gaining independence from Britain in 1965, Gambians went to the polls to sever the remaining constitutional tie to the British monarchy. The referendum passed, transforming the small West African nation into a republic and elevating Prime Minister Dawda Jawara to the presidency, a position he would hold for the next 24 years.

Priced at $395, roughly $2,900 today, the HP-35 could perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions that had previously required a slide rule or bulky desktop machine. Engineers and scientists adopted it rapidly, and within a few years the slide rule, a tool of engineering education for generations, effectively vanished from classrooms and drafting tables worldwide.