On this day

TodayIn 1959 the prime minister Harold Macmillan and President Eisenhower gave a joint live TV broadcast from Downing Street, after discussing world peace, global poverty and Soviet encroachment in Europe; in 1969 Rocky Marciano, the former world heavyweight boxing champion, died in an aircraft crash in Iowa on the day before his 46th birthday; in 1994 Russia officially ended its military presence in the former East Germany along with several Baltic countries, after a near-50 year occupation; in 1994 the Provisional Irish Republican Army announced a ceasefire to continue talks on a peace process for Northern Ireland. The truce ended 18 months later when the IRA detonated a bomb in the Docklands area of east London, killing two people.TomorrowIn 1715 Louis XIV (the Sun King) died after his left leg had turned gangrenous, ending a 72-year reign. Following French royal tradition, his corpse was divided into body, heart and entrails; in 1773 Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was printed in London – the first volume of poetry by an African-American to be published. After a visit to the UK, pressure from friends in London led to her being freed from slavery in 1775; in 1858 the East India Company’s formal rule of India ended as the British Crown took over its territories.