On August 28, 1879, British troops finally closed in on the fugitive monarch who had so recently commanded the fearsome Zulu army. King Cetshwayo kaMpande, last sovereign of an independent Zulu nation, was captured in the aftermath of one of the most brutal colonial…
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On the late summer of 1859, the world of energy shifted dramatically toward petroleum. On August 27, 1859, Edwin L. Drake—working on behalf of the Seneca Oil Company (formerly the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company)—succeeded where many before him had failed. Along Oil Creek near…
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On August 26, 2021, just days before the United States was set to complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the war’s closing chapter turned bloody. At Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where tens of thousands of Afghans were crowding the gates in a desperate…
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On August 25, 1945—just ten days after Japan announced its surrender and brought the Second World War to a close—an American intelligence officer named John Birch was killed in China under circumstances that soon became freighted with political meaning. To his comrades, he was…
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On August 24, 1857, the United States was jolted into one of the most severe economic crises of the 19th century. Known as the Panic of 1857, the crash reverberated across the Atlantic, exposing the fragility of a rapidly expanding economy bound to global…
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On August 23, 1839, the Union Jack was raised over Hong Kong, securing for Britain not only a natural harbor but also a vital position from which to defend free commerce in Asia. What might have seemed a barren outpost to the casual observer…
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On August 22, 1642, King Charles I, beleaguered and defiant, stood before his dwindling court and supporters on the windswept hill at Nottingham. That day, he ordered his royal standard raised—a symbolic gesture that declared open war upon his own Parliament. Though the flag…
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On the morning of August 21, 1911, the Louvre awoke to a scandal that would forever change the way the world viewed art, museums, and security. The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait of Lisa Gherardini, vanished from its place in the Salon…
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By mid-August 1988, the vast wilderness of Yellowstone National Park was already under siege. Months of drought, coupled with unusually strong winds, had turned the forests of lodgepole pine into tinder. What began earlier that summer as scattered blazes—some ignited by lightning, others sparked…
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The Roman Republic, still reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the previous year, faced another constitutional crisis in the summer of 43 BC. Caesar’s designated heir—his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, now calling himself Caesar—was only nineteen years old. Yet by August 19 of that…
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