On May 30, 1989, student demonstrators unveil a 33-foot high “Goddess of Democracy and Freedom” statue in Tiananmen Square.
Also on this day: Joan of Arc was executed — for heresy, and after much debate about her cross-dressing — by immolation in 1431; Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, poet and playwright, died under mysterious circumstances in 1593; Voltaire died in 1778, and his friends secretly buried him — against Catholic Church policy — in the abbey of Scellières in Champagne (his body was later disinterred and buried in Paris by the order of the National Assembly of France).