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 August 28, 1963, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most iconic speeches in American history. The “I Have a Dream” speech became a defining moment in the Civil Rights Movement, encapsulating…
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On August 28, 1955, one of the worst examples of violence and injustice occurred in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was brutally murdered while visiting his cousins in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn…
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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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The first edition of the Guinness Book of Records was published in Great Britain on August 27, 1955, marking the beginning of what would become a global phenomenon. Conceived as a book to settle pub arguments, it quickly transformed into one of the most…
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“Rome, once the capital of the world, is now the grave of the Roman people,” wrote Saint Jerome of a cataclysm in 410 of a disaster that few could have predicted. On August 27 of that year, following 800 years of military domination and…
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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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John Fitch, an American inventor, secured a patent for the steamboat on August 26, 1791, marking a significant milestone in the early history of American innovation and transportation. Fitch’s journey to this achievement was fraught with challenges, yet his relentless determination laid the groundwork…
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On August 26, 1883, the loudest sound ever recorded happened in Indonesia on a caldera situated in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The volcano known as Krakatoa erupted with such force that it…
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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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