On This Day for February 9 - Calcutta restored to British control, Alice Walker is featured, and more

Created: 2020-02-09 11:02 Updated: 2020-02-09 11:02 Notebook: On this Day in History

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February 09

FEATURED BIOGRAPHY

1944

Alice Walker

FEATURED EVENT

1757

Calcutta restored to British control

MORE EVENTS ON THIS DAY

Princess Margaret, photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1951.

2002: Princess Margaret—who, as King George VI's second daughter and the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, struggled to balance her independent spirit with her duties as a member of Britain's royal family—died in London. [Sort fact from fiction in our English Royalty quiz .]

U.S. Marines landing on Guadalcanal, August 1942.

1943: The Battle of Guadalcanal ended with an Allied victory over Japan. [ Test your knowledge about which countries fought on which side during World War II .]

1940: South African novelist, critic, and translator J.M. Coetzee, who won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born. [Sort fact from fiction with our Famous Writers quiz .]

1996: German physicist Peter Armbruster and his team of scientists synthesized chemical element 112, a heavy transuranium element that was later named copernicium.

1984: Soviet Premier Yury Andropov died, 15 months after succeeding Leonid Brezhnev, and was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko. [ From “terrible” rulers to infamous tsars, test your knowledge of Russia .]