The Battle of Vasai concludes as the Marathas defeat the Portuguese army.

The Battle of Vasai occurred in 1739 and was fought between the Maratha Empire, under the leadership of Chimaji Appa, and the Portuguese army, who controlled the fortified town of Vasai. The Marathas sought to capture Vasai as part of their expansionist ambitions and to establish their dominance in the region.

The battle was a significant event in the larger conflict between the Marathas and the Portuguese, who had been involved in territorial disputes for several decades. The Marathas had already captured numerous Portuguese-held territories along the western coast of India.

In the Battle of Vasai, the Marathas launched a siege on the fortified town, employing various tactics such as artillery bombardment and digging tunnels to undermine the Portuguese defenses. The Portuguese, led by their commander Sá e Menezes, put up a strong resistance, but were ultimately overwhelmed by the superior numbers and tactics of the Marathas.

After an intense battle that lasted for several weeks, the Marathas emerged victorious, forcing the Portuguese to surrender. The capture of Vasai by the Marathas marked a significant milestone in their expansion and further weakened the Portuguese presence in the region.

Juan Godoy discovers the rich silver outcrops of Chañarcillo sparking the Chilean silver rush.

Mary, Queen of Scots, flees to England

The Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ends.

[rdp-wiki-embed url=’https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising’]

Pope Benedict XV canonizes Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc, a peasant girl living in medieval France, believed that God had chosen her to lead France to victory in its long-running war with England. With no military training, Joan convinced the embattled crown prince Charles of Valois to allow her to lead a French army to the besieged city of Orléans, where it achieved a momentous victory over the English and their French allies, the Burgundians. After seeing the prince crowned King Charles VII, Joan was captured by Anglo-Burgundian forces, tried for witchcraft and heresy and burned at the stake in 1431, at the age of 19. By the time she was officially canonized in 1920, the Maid of Orléans had long been considered one of history’s greatest saints, and an enduring symbol of French unity and nationalism.

Born around 1412, Jeanne d’Arc was the daughter of a tenant farmer, Jacques d’Arc, from the village of Domrémy, in northeastern France. She was not taught to read or write, but her pious mother instilled in her a deep love for the Catholic Church and its teachings. At the time, France had long been torn apart by a bitter conflict with England, in which England had gained the upper hand. A peace treaty in 1420 disinherited the French crown prince, Charles of Valois, amid accusations of his illegitimacy, and King Henry V was made ruler of both England and France. His son, Henry VI, succeeded him in 1422. Along with its French allies, England occupied much of northern France, and many in Joan’s village, Domrémy, were forced to abandon their homes under threat of invasion.

The Communist Party of China issues its May 16 Notice to start the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in China from 1966 until 1976. Launched by Mao Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, its stated goal was to preserve ‘true’ Communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Maoist thought as the dominant ideology within the Party. The Revolution marked Mao’s return to a position of power after the Great Leap Forward. The movement paralyzed China politically and negatively affected the country’s economy and society to a significant degree.

The movement was launched in May 1966, after Mao alleged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society at large, aiming to restore capitalism. To eliminate his rivals within the Communist Party of China, Mao insisted that these “revisionists” be removed through violent class struggle. China’s youth responded to Mao’s appeal by forming Red Guard groups around the country. The movement spread into the military, urban workers, and the Communist Party leadership itself. It resulted in widespread factional struggles in all walks of life. In the top leadership, it led to a mass purge of senior officials, most notably Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. During the same period, Mao’s personality cult grew to immense proportions.

In the violent struggles that ensued across the country, millions of people were persecuted and suffered a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, hard labor, sustained harassment, seizure of property and sometimes execution. A large segment of the population was forcibly displaced, most notably the transfer of urban youth to rural regions during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed. Cultural and religious sites were ransacked.

Mao officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have ended in 1969, but its active phase lasted until the death of military leader and proposed Mao successor Lin Biao in 1971. After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping gradually began to dismantle the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution. In 1981, the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”.

In May 16, 1966, an “expanded session” of the Politburo was called in Beijing. The conference, rather than being a joint discussion on policy, was essentially a campaign to mobilize the Politburo into endorsing Mao’s political agenda. The conference was heavily laden with Maoist political rhetoric on class struggle, and filled with meticulously-prepared ‘indictments’ on the recently ousted leaders such as Peng Zhen and Luo Ruiqing. One of these documents, released on May 16, was prepared with Mao’s personal supervision, and was particularly damning:

Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khruschev for example, who are still nestling beside us.

This text, which became known as the “May 16 Notification”, summarized Mao’s ideological justification for the Cultural Revolution. Effectively it implied that there are enemies of the Communist cause within the Party itself: class enemies who “wave the red flag to oppose the red flag.” The only way to identify these people was through “the telescope and microscope of Mao Zedong Thought.” While the party leadership was relatively united in approving the general direction of Mao’s agenda, many Politburo members were not especially enthusiastic, or simply confused about the direction of the movement. The charges against esteemed party leaders like Peng Zhen rang alarm bells in China’s intellectual community and among the eight non-Communist parties.

The first Academy Awards are awarded.

A major political crisis takes place in France.

The first Academy Awards are handed out.