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Luo Yixiu (1889–1910) was the first wife of the future Chinese communist revolutionary and political leader Mao Zedong, to whom she was married from 1908 until her death. She came from a family of impoverished Han Chinese landowners near Shaoshan, Hunan, in south central China. Most of what is known about their marriage comes from Mao and appears in the 1936 book Red Star Over China by the reporter Edgar Snow. The marriage was arranged by their fathers when Luo was eighteen and Mao was just fourteen. He later said that he was unhappy with the marriage, never consummating it and refusing to live with his wife. He moved out of the village to continue his studies elsewhere, eventually becoming a founding member of the Communist Party of China. Luo, socially disgraced, lived with Mao's parents for two years until she died of dysentery. Various biographers have suggested that this marriage affected Mao's later views, leading him to become a critic of arranged marriage and a vocal feminist. He would marry three more times, to Yang Kaihui, He Zizhen and Jiang Qing. (Full article...)

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On this day...

October 20: Birth of the Báb, a holy day in the Bahá'í Faith

Maria Theresa of Austria

1740 – Under the terms of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, Maria Theresa (pictured) assumed the throne of the Habsburg Monarchy in Austria.
1818 – The United Kingdom and the United States signed the Treaty of 1818, which settled the Canada–United States border on the 49th parallel between the Rocky Mountains and Lake of the Woods.
1944 – World War II: Fulfilling a promise he made two years previous, General Douglas MacArthur landed on Leyte to begin the recapture of the entire Philippine Archipelago.
1961 – The Soviet Union performed the first armed test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile, launching an R-13 from a Golf class submarine.
1982 – During a UEFA Cup match between FC Spartak Moscow and HFC Haarlem, a large number of attendees tried to leave the Grand Sports Arena of the Central Lenin Stadium at the same time, resulting in a stampede that caused 66 deaths.

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Muammar Gaddafi (c. 1942 – 2011) was a Libyan revolutionary and politician. Taking power in a coup d'etat, he ruled as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the "Brotherly Leader" of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011, when he was ousted in the Libyan Civil War. Initially developing his own variant of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism known as the Third International Theory, he later embraced Pan-Africanism and served as Chairperson of the African Union from 2009 to 2010.

Photograph: Jesse B. Awalt/US Navy

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