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May 23

Published in On this Day listing

2011 Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States, made a one-day visit to Ireland, during which he visited his distant cousins in Moneygall. Co. Offaly, and addressed a crowd of 25,000 in College Green, Dublin.
1770 ‘The Deserted Village’ (likely the village of Auburn, near Athlone) by Oliver Goldsmith was published.
1949 West Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany until German reunification in 1990, came into being.
2011 US President Barack Obama made a one-day visit to Ireland during which he visited his ancestral village of Moneygall, Co. Offaly, and addressed a rapturous 50,000-strong crowd in Dublin’s College Green.
1910 Mary Eva Kelly, widow of the Young Irelander Kevin Izod O’Doherty (d. 1905) and poet, known as ‘Eva of the Nation’, who contributed patriotic verse and poetry to The Nation and other nationalist periodicals, died in poverty in Brisbane.
1618 The Defenestration of Prague marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in human history and Europe’s deadliest religious war.

On this Day

1871 John Millington Synge, key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre and playwright, notably of The Playboy of the Western World, born in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin.
1947 The expression ‘Cold War’, a war waged through proxies, was coined by the US statesman and millionaire financier Bernard Baruch.
1917 After twelve years in exile, the leading Russian Bolshevik, Vladimir Illyich Lenin (47), arrived in St Petersburg after a week-long journey from Zurich in a sealed train.
1862 Sir Thomas Wyse, politician and diplomat and major player in the struggle for Catholic Emancipation, died in Athens.
1660 Sir Hans Sloane, physician and collector, whose natural history collection formed the foundation of the British Museum, was born at Killyleagh Castle, Co. Down.