311
A porphyry portrait head of Emperor Galerius from his palace at Romuliana (Gamzigrad), in present-day Serbia.Image: Shinjirod · CC BY 3.0culture · Middle East
Rome ends its great persecution of Christians
On 30 April 311 an edict in the name of the senior emperor Galerius was posted at Nicomedia, the eastern imperial capital in what is now north-west Turkey. After eight years of the harshest persecution Christians had faced, it allowed them to exist again and to hold their meetings, provided they did nothing against public order. Galerius, who had been one of the persecution’s chief supporters, was gravely ill and asked Christians in return to pray for him and for the state. He died within days, and two years later the emperors Constantine and Licinius went further, granting freedom of worship to all.
Source: Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, ch. 34-35 (New Advent) ↗
Ramon de Elorriaga’s painting of Washington taking the oath on the balcony of Federal Hall, New York.Image: 
A modern map of the Louisiana Purchase (white) within the present-day United States.Image: 
A late 19th-century postcard showing Mexican soldiers lifting wounded legionnaires after the fight at Camarón.Image: 
J. J. Thomson’s cathode-ray tube of 1897, the apparatus of his electron experiments (Science Museum, London).Image: 
Georges Rochegrosse’s poster for the first production of Pelléas et Mélisande, 1902.Image: 
A British army photographer in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, July 1945.Image: 
Will Lammert’s sculpture Tragende (Woman with a Burden) at the Ravensbrück memorial.Image: 
The headquarters of the Organization of American States in Washington, DC.Image: 
Tank 843, one of the North Vietnamese tanks that broke into the Independence Palace grounds, kept at the palace in Ho Chi Minh City.Image: 
An embroidered white headscarf of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, asking for the disappeared to be returned alive (Museo del Bicentenario, Buenos Aires).Image: 
Queen Beatrix and Princess Juliana on the balcony of the Royal Palace in Amsterdam after the abdication, 30 April 1980.Image: 
The NeXT computer that Tim Berners-Lee used at CERN as the first web server.Image: 
Emperor Akihito in 2016.Image: