Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, officially opened in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. 2010. 

Poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry with such works as The Waste Land (1922), died in London. 1965. 

Novelist and playwright Albert Camus, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, was killed in an automobile accident in France. 1960. 

Burma—today called Myanmar—formally gained independence from Great Britain, completing the peaceful transfer of power negotiated by Burmese leader Aung San and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1947. 1948. 

Solomon Northrup, a free Black man who had been kidnapped in Washington, D.C., and sold into slavery, legally obtained his freedom. He later wrote about his experiences in Twelve Years a Slave, which became the basis for an Oscar-winning movie. 1853. 

Louis Braille, who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him, was born near Paris. 1809.