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John Calvin (1509–1564) was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he suddenly broke from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1520s. After religious tensions provoked a violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where in 1536 he published the first edition of his seminal work Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin was mainly based in Geneva where he promoted reforms in the church. He introduced new forms of church government and liturgy, despite the opposition of several powerful families in the city. Calvin's writing and preaching provided the seeds for the branch of theology that bears his name. The Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, which look to Calvin as a chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world. Calvin's thought exerted considerable influence over major religious figures and entire religious movements, such as Puritanism, and his ideas have been cited as contributing to the rise of capitalism, individualism, and representative democracy in the West. (more...)

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July 10: Independence Day in the Bahamas (1973); Silence Day

• 1553 – Four days after the death of her predecessor, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (pictured) was officially proclaimed Queen of England, beginning her reign as the "The Nine Days' Queen".
• 1796 – German mathematician and scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers.
• 1800 – Lord Wellesley, Governor-General of the British Raj, founded Fort William College in Fort William, India, to promote Bengali, Hindi and other vernaculars of the subcontinent.
• 1941 – The Holocaust: Approximately 40 non-Jewish ethnic Poles from around the nearby area murdered hundreds of Jewish residents of Jedwabne in occupied Poland.
• 1976 – An industrial accident in a chemical manufacturing plant near Milan, Italy, resulted in the highest known exposure to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin in residential populations, which gave rise to numerous scientific studies and standardized industrial safety regulations.

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