Seeking a westward route to the Indies, Christopher Columbus on this day in 1492 set sail on his first transatlantic voyage, departing from Palos, Spain, with three small ships — the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María.
On August 3, 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 90.
Solzhenitsyn’s novels, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, explored life under totalitarian Communism, and remain classics of modern literature. His huge survey of Soviet concentration camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was an important contribution to the demise of Communism as a popular ideology, showing just how horrifying the repression in the Soviet Union had become.