28th August 1963: Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.
Taking place on the centenary of President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, in which he declared the freedom of slaves, ‘I Have a Dream’ was the sixteenth of eighteen speeches given by different orators that day and is regularly described as one of the best speeches of the 20th ...
28 Aug 0s
27th August 1928: The Kellogg-Briand Pact to renounce war signed by 15 nations including Germany, France and the United States
At the time it was optimistically hoped that the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact would stop any future wars, but the impact of the Great Depression in the 1930s led nations such as Japan and Italy to launch invasions of Manchuria and Abyssinia ...
27 Aug 0s
26th August 1914: Battle of Tannenberg begins in the early weeks of the First World War between Russian and German forces
Exploiting intercepted Russian radio messages, which had not been encrypted, the Germans were able to anticipate the Russians’ movements and concentrate their forces effectively. By 30 August, Russian resistance ...
26 Aug 0s
25th August 1835: The Great Moon Hoax begins to appear in The New York Sun newspaper as a series of articles
The articles that formed the “Great Moon Hoax” stated that famed astronomer John Herschel had observed animals resembling bison, goats, and even humanoid bat-like creatures on the Moon alongside forests, oceans, pyramids, and ...
25 Aug 0s
24th August 79: The eruption of Mount Vesuvius wipes out numerous Roman settlements including Pompeii and Herculaneum
Beginning at around 1pm on 24 August, Mount Vesuvius sent gas, volcanic ash, and pumice into the stratosphere for up to 20 hours. This was followed by a pyroclastic flow that carried gas and molten rock down from the volcano and which then buried the previously fallen ...
24 Aug 0s
23rd August 1942: Battle of Stalingrad enters its most intense phase with a bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe
While the broader Battle of Stalingrad began on 17 July, it wasn’t until 23 August that the city itself was attacked. Over 1,000 German aircraft dropped bombs in one of the Eastern Front’s most intense aerial ...
23 Aug 0s
21st August 1911: Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa stolen from the Louvre in Paris
Vincenzo Peruggia served just six months in jail for the robbery, and was hailed by many Italians as a nationalist hero for returning the Mona Lisa to her real home although it was later returned to ...
21 Aug 0s
