22. August

Francis Day and Andrew Cogan got a strip of beach from the local Nayaka, who served the last Vijayanagara king, to build a fortified factory. Building began in 1640; the fort was named Fort St George, and the town that grew around it is Chennai.

From Charles I raising his standard at Nottingham to Charles II riding into London. At Oxford, John Wilkins gathered the experimenters who would found the Royal Society: Boyle, Wren, Hooke.

France’s richest colony. On the night of 22 August the enslaved of the Northern Plain rose and burned the plantations. It became the Haitian Revolution, the only slave revolt in history to found a state.

Saint-Domingue, the richest colony in the world, held about half a million enslaved people. On the night of 22 August 1791 they rose on the northern plain and burned the plantations. Twelve years of war against planters and against Spanish, British and French armies ended with the only successful…

Australian Overland Telegraph completedAustralian Overland Telegraph Line

Charles Todd’s line ran about 3,200 kilometres from Port Augusta through the desert to Darwin, on 36,000 poles, many of them iron because termites ate the wooden ones. Alice Springs grew from one of its repeater stations, named after Todd’s wife.

At his farewell party he read of a bill to take the vote from Indians in Natal, and stayed on as the new Congress’s secretary. Its members were mostly merchants. The historians Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed show that his writings of these years used the colonial slur for Africans and argued that…

The first great flying meeting, on the plain of Bétheny, backed by the champagne houses. Henri Farman flew 180 kilometres in just over three hours, and the American Glenn Curtiss won the first Gordon Bennett speed trophy.

And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. — Fannie Lou Hamer The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the state’s all-white delegation at the Democratic convention. Hamer told of being beaten in jail for trying to register. Johnson called a press…

Feeling left out and sure the other three were closer than he was, the drummer quit and went on a friend’s yacht off Sardinia. McCartney drummed on “Back in the U.S.S.R.”. Starr came back on 3 September to find his kit covered in flowers.

Five years after forcing Bulgaria’s Turks to take Slavic names, Todor Zhivkov told them on television they were free to go to Turkey. More than 300,000 left that summer, until Turkey closed its border; tens of thousands later came back.