Today is Universal Children's Day. In 1954, the United Nations General Assembly proposed that all countries set aside a day to promote understanding between children, and activities that would advance the welfare of children everywhere. Five years later — on this date in 1959 — the General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, stating that children must be fed and sheltered and that their rights and privileges must be protected.

The Gettysburg Address, one of the most quoted speeches in US history, was delivered by President Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and half months after the famous battle fought there. In approximately three minutes, Lincoln's address redefined the American Civil War as not merely a struggle for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" for the US and its people. Lincoln's address has drawn comparisons to what ancient speech?

Wyndham Lewis

"Give me the outside of all things, I am a fanatic for the externality of things."

Wyndham Lewis, 1937

English artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, born this day in 1882, founded the abstract Vorticist movement, which, in painting and literature before World War I, sought to relate art to the industrial process.

Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple religious community that he formed in the 1950s, and some 900 of his followers died this day in 1978 in Guyana in a massive act of murder-suicide known as the Jonestown massacre.

More Events on this day:

1941: John Christian Watson, the first Labour prime minister of Australia, died in Sydney.

1905: Prince Charles (Carl) of Denmark was elected king of Norway as Haakon VII.

1903: Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla, representing Panama, met with U.S. Secretary of State John Hay to negotiate the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which gave the United States a strip 10 miles (16 km) wide across the Isthmus of Panama for construction of the Panama Canal.

1882: Famed operatic soprano Amelita Galli-Curci was born in Milan.

1814: Brazilian sculptor and architect Aleijadinho, known for his beautiful Rococo statues and his churches, died in Mariana.

1477: William Caxton, a pioneering English printer, published Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, the first dated book printed in England.

was signed; it resolved some leftover issues between the United States and Great Britain after the Revolutionary War (1794)

became the first Arab leader to officially visit the state of Israel (1977)