This day in history

Lord Byron, the great English poet, dies from a fever in Missolonghi, Greece.

Mourned as a national hero in Greece, Byron had donated £4,000 to the Greek Navy and personally came to the country to unite nationalist factions in their struggle for independence from the Turks. He died shortly after taking command of a brigade of Christian Souliot guerrillas from the Greek region of Epirus. Remembered for his epic poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, Byron was one of the most popular poets of his day and the epitome of the sensual romantic figure. His idealistic accounts of his travels to Greece did much to awaken Europe to the plight of the Greeks under Ottoman rule.

Prince Rainier of Monaco marries the American actress Grace Kelly.
 

World War II: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising begins.