What happened on 16 May?

14 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1966 Cultural Revolution Decade of Maoist upheaval that purges intellectuals and devastates Chinese culture.
2. 1961 Park Chung-hee's coup A military coup brings Park Chung-hee to power; his authoritarian rule drives the 'Miracle on the Han River' industrialisation.
3. 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement Secret Anglo-French treaty partitioning Ottoman Arab provinces; reshapes the Middle East after WWI.
4. 2014 Narendra Modi elected prime minister Hindu nationalist BJP wins a parliamentary majority; ends decades of coalition rule.
5. 1967 Nasser orders the UN peacekeepers out of Sinai Fed false Soviet intelligence of an imminent Israeli attack on Syria, Nasser demands the UN force that has kept Egypt and Israel apart since Suez leave Sinai — and to general aston
6. 1920 Joan of Arc canonised Four hundred and eighty-nine years after the Church burned her, the Church declares her a saint — before 60,000 people in St Peter's, with a France fresh from the trenches watching
7. 1990 AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted (Ice Cube album) Ice Cube's post-N.W.A debut, produced with Public Enemy's Bomb Squad.
8. 1791 Boswell's Life of Johnson James Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson, widely regarded as the greatest biography in the English language.
9. 2007 Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy The financial crisis, the Libya intervention and a restless hyper-presidency.
10. 1926 De Valera founds Fianna Fáil Breaking with Sinn Féin's abstentionism, de Valera launches a new republican party at Dublin's La Scala Theatre; within six years it is in government, and it dominates Irish politi
11. 1770 Marriage of Louis-Auguste and Marie Antoinette The fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess marries the French dauphin at Versailles to seal the alliance between Habsburgs and Bourbons; the marriage goes unconsummated for seven y
12. 1871 Toppling of the Vendôme Column The Paris Commune pulls down Napoleon's victory column; Courbet, a Communard, is jailed and ruined by the bill to rebuild it, and dies in Swiss exile.
13. 1717 Voltaire imprisoned in the Bastille Jailed for eleven months over verses mocking the Regent, the young François-Marie Arouet writes his tragedy Oedipe and emerges as 'Voltaire'.
14. 1763 Johnson meets Boswell In Tom Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden, the 22-year-old Scot James Boswell meets Johnson — the start of the friendship behind the greatest biography in English.