15. August

A huge Arab army and fleet under Maslama besieged the city for a year. Greek fire burned the fleet, a hard winter and hunger thinned the army, and the Bulgars attacked it in the rear. Only a fraction of the fleet got home.

A huge Arab army and fleet under Maslama besieged the city for a year. Greek fire burned the fleet, a hard winter and hunger thinned the army, and the Bulgars attacked it in the rear. Only a fraction of the fleet got home.

Urban set the departure for the Feast of the Assumption. Armies under Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders met at Constantinople and marched together. By the siege of Jerusalem, Raymond of Aguilers reckoned, they had no more than…

Cologne: the medieval campaignCologne Cathedral

Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the first stone on 15 August 1248 for a church modelled on Amiens and the Sainte-Chapelle, under a master known only as Gerhard. Clearing the old cathedral by fire, the builders burned most of it down by accident; the shrine of the Magi was saved. The choir…

A typhoon caught the combined fleet at anchor off Takashima and sank much of it; the Japanese called it the kamikaze, the divine wind. Divers have since found the fleet’s wrecks in the mud of Imari Bay.

The Jesuit came with a Japanese convert, Anjirō. By about 1600 Japan had some 300,000 Christians; then came bans and martyrdoms, and “hidden Christians” kept the faith in secret until the ban was lifted in 1873.

The Jesuit landed at Kagoshima with a Japanese convert, Anjirō. The Catholic Reformation went global while the Protestant one stayed European: by 1600 Japan had some 300,000 Christians, before persecution all but ended the mission.

The violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon brought Haydn over for the seasons of 1791–92 and 1794–95; in between he was back in Vienna. He wrote twelve symphonies, Nos. 93 to 104, for London, and Oxford made him a Doctor of Music.

A year after Satsuma men cut down the English merchant Charles Richardson at Namamugi, seven British warships came for reparations and shelled Kagoshima. Satsuma drew the lesson: it paid, then bought British ships and sent students to London. Japanese calendar: Bunkyū 3, 7th month, 2nd day

Arthur’s father is better, and he wants the marriage soon. Mrs. Westenra tells Mina in secret that she has been told she has only a few months to live, as her heart is weakening, and that a sudden shock could kill her at any time.

Serbian troops under Stepa Stepanović drove the first Austro-Hungarian invasion back across the Drina: the first Allied victory of the war.

Chief engineer and chairman of the commission, with the powers of a military governor. Every Sunday morning he heard complaints from any employee in person. In April 1914 he became the first Governor of the Panama Canal.

Ten years from the handover of the French works to the first official transit. The United States spent about $375 million, including $40 million to the French company and $10 million to Panama, the most it had ever spent on one project.

The Panama Railroad’s steamship Ancon left Cristóbal in the morning and reached Balboa about nine and a half hours later. War had broken out in Europe eleven days before, and the opening drew little notice.

Some 2,500 delegates in the Bolshoi Theatre, meant to rally the nation behind the government. The right cheered Kornilov; Moscow’s workers answered with a one-day general strike on the opening day.

Otis Barton’s hollow steel ball, 1.45 m across, hung on a single steel cable from a barge off Bermuda. A telephone line ran to the deck, where Gloria Hollister wrote down everything William Beebe described through the quartz windows. A 1932 dive went out live on NBC radio.

Beebe and Barton went down to 3,028 feet, deeper than anyone had been and alive. The record stood until Barton’s own benthoscope went deeper off California in 1949.

At noon in Tokyo most Japanese heard Hirohito’s voice for the first time, in a recording made the night before that army officers had tried and failed to seize. He never used the word surrender; the war situation, he said, “has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”.

He spent the day in a Muslim house in Calcutta, fasting and spinning, not celebrating. Mountbatten called him Bengal’s one-man boundary force: 55,000 soldiers could not keep the peace in the Punjab. Estimates of Partition’s dead run from about 200,000 to two million, and more than ten million…

The Constituent Assembly met at 11 at night for a session timed to end at midnight. In the morning Mountbatten was sworn in as free India’s first governor-general, now at India’s invitation.

The name the British press gave the screaming, from a Sunday-night television show in October 1963 to the biggest crowd a band had ever drawn, at Shea Stadium. In between, police used water hoses on crowds outside British theatres, and America caught it too.

A helicopter to the World’s Fair grounds, an armoured van to the field, then 12 songs to 55,600 people through the stadium’s public-address system. Nobody, the band included, heard much. It grossed $304,000, a record for a concert.

I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets — Richard Nixon On a Sunday evening, after a secret weekend at Camp David, the president also froze wages and prices and put a 10 per cent surcharge on imports. The…

Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, and the dollar to gold at 35 dollars an ounce, convertible for foreign central banks. It worked only while the world trusted that America’s gold could cover its dollars, and by the 1960s it could not.

A funding cut-off passed in June ended all American combat in Indochina on 15 August. The bombing of Cambodia, which had grown heavier since the Paris agreement, stopped that day.

A “curry western” with Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra and the bandit Gabbar Singh, whose lines audiences learned by heart. Critics panned it and the first weeks were slow; then word of mouth took over, and it ran at Bombay’s Minerva for five years.

Expected to announce real reform, the state president told the world instead that he would not lead white South Africans on “a road to abdication and suicide”. The rand fell sharply, foreign banks called in their loans, and on 1 September the government froze repayment of its foreign debt.

Talks between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement, mediated by the former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, began in January 2005 with the province in ruins. The agreement ended nearly thirty years of war: the rebels gave up their weapons, troops withdrew, and Aceh won…

The Taliban took Kabul on 15 August 2021. Their first government, 1996 to 2001, had barred girls from school and women from most work. Decrees since 2021 have shut women out of most jobs, parks and gyms and long journeys without a male relative. Afghanistan is the only country that bars girls from…