28. August

Released by Saladin, King Guy besieged Acre with a small army and was himself besieged by Saladin’s. For two years each side’s camp starved and sickened as crusaders arrived by sea; Queen Sibylla and her daughters died there.

First night of Herschel’s forty-foot telescopeHerschel's 40-foot telescope

A speculum mirror about 1.2 metres across in a tube 40 feet long, swung in a timber scaffold beside Herschel’s house near Windsor. On its first night it showed him a sixth moon of Saturn, Enceladus. It was the largest telescope in the world for over fifty years, but the mirror tarnished fast and…

Parliament took away the China monopoly and told the Company to stop trading altogether from April 1834. It sold its ships and warehouses and became a government for India. Shareholders got a fixed dividend of 10½ per cent, paid out of Indian revenues.

It freed the enslaved of most British colonies from 1 August 1834. Parliament voted £20 million in compensation to the slave owners, about 40 per cent of the government’s yearly spending. The enslaved got nothing.

Britain freed the enslaved people of most of its colonies from 1834 and paid their owners £20 million in compensation; the enslaved got nothing. Lancashire’s mills went on spinning cotton grown by enslaved people in the American South, which supplied most of their raw cotton.

Royal assent this day. Divorce moved from private Acts of Parliament, which only four women had ever obtained, to a new court. A husband could divorce for adultery alone; a wife had to prove adultery and cruelty, desertion, incest or bigamy. The double standard lasted until 1923. Caroline Norton,…

Jackson held John Pope’s army on the old battlefield while Longstreet came up and smashed its flank. 22,180 casualties (NPS), and the Confederates were free to invade the North.

A veil of fine dust and sulphuric-acid droplets high in the stratosphere drifted west round the tropics, a stream the observers called the “equatorial smoke-stream”, and then spread towards the poles. It gave blue and green suns, a halo round the Sun, and vivid red afterglows, brightest in…

Some 22 hours of near-continuous explosions, peaking on the morning of 27 August, left two-thirds of the island gone and the sea 200 to 300 metres deep where Perboewatan and Danan had stood. About 20 cubic kilometres of ash and pumice were thrown out, which puts the eruption at 6 on the Volcanic…

Three years and two months. At the Berlin Olympics in 1936 Cunningham took the 1500 metres silver behind Lovelock.

A slight, bespectacled solicitor’s clerk, set up for the record in a handicap race so that runners given starts would pull him along. The war took his best years.

Kiichiro Toyoda, son of the loom inventor Sakichi Toyoda, spun his father’s firm’s car department into a company of its own. Part of the start-up money came from selling a loom patent to Britain’s Platt Brothers. Its main plant, at Koromo, opened in 1938.

Almost five years, most of them after war broke out in 1939.

A fourteen-year-old from Chicago, visiting his great-uncle Moses Wright near Money, Mississippi, was accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s store. Days later her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam took him from Wright’s house at night and killed him.…

The march was due to step off at 11:30, but the leaders were still meeting members of Congress, and the crowd set off without them down Constitution and Independence Avenues. The police gave out 200,000 early in the day; 250,000 is the figure most sources use, and some observers put it above…

King: “I have a dream”I Have a Dream

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. — King King spoke sixteenth of eighteen, in the middle of the afternoon. The dream passage was not in his prepared text; Mahalia…

Kennedy had kept away from the march. At five o’clock he received its ten leaders at the White House, praised the day, and told them the votes for his bill were not yet there.

Two days after that, Coe answered with more than a second. The record then stood for four years.

On its way to Jupiter it flew past the asteroid Ida. Pictures played back months later showed a moonlet about 1.4 km across, later named Dactyl: the first moon of an asteroid ever found.

India’s first Moon mission. Its Moon Impact Probe struck near the south pole on 14 November 2008, and NASA’s mapper on board found the signature of water spread thinly across the surface.