1947India wakes to independence
Britain had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent, first through the East India Company and from 1858 through the Crown, for close to two centuries. Decades of campaigning by the Indian National Congress, Mahatma Gandhi’s mass movements and the strains of the Second World War left Britain both unwilling and unable to hold on. In June 1947 the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, announced that power would be handed over within weeks, and that British India would be divided into two states, India and Pakistan.
Just before midnight on 14 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi and told the members that, as the world slept, India would awake to life and freedom. On 15 August 1947 India became an independent dominion, with Nehru as its first prime minister, and the saffron, white and green flag flew over Delhi. Gandhi spent the day praying and fasting in Calcutta. Partition was followed by terrible violence and the flight of millions of people across the new borders; estimates of the dead range from hundreds of thousands to a million. India marks 15 August every year as Independence Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Independence Day (Indian holiday) ↗
1945Japan hears its emperor announce the end of the war
By August 1945 Japan’s cities had been burned by bombing, two had been destroyed by atomic bombs and the Soviet Union had entered the war against it. On 14 August Emperor Hirohito’s government accepted the Allied terms set out in the Potsdam Declaration, and that night the emperor recorded a rescript announcing the decision. A group of young army officers tried to stop it, seizing parts of the Imperial Palace and searching for the recording, but they failed to find it and the revolt collapsed before morning.
At noon on 15 August 1945 the recording was broadcast across Japan and its empire. Most Japanese had never heard their emperor’s voice. His courtly language was hard to follow and he never used the word ‘surrender’, but listeners understood that the war was over, and many wept. The formal surrender was signed aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. Japan still marks 15 August as the anniversary of the end of the war.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Diet Library: Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, 14 August 1945 ↗
1914The Panama Canal opens to shipping
A French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, began digging across the Isthmus of Panama in 1881 but was beaten by landslides, yellow fever and malaria, and went bankrupt. The United States took over the works in 1904. Under the engineer George Washington Goethals, workers from the Caribbean, Europe and the Americas cut through the mountains at Culebra, dammed the Chagres River to make the vast Gatun Lake, and built giant locks to lift ships 26 metres above sea level. Thousands of workers died in the course of the French and American projects.
On 15 August 1914 the cargo and passenger ship Ancon left Cristóbal on the Atlantic side at 7.10 in the morning and crossed the isthmus to Balboa on the Pacific, a passage of about 80 kilometres. Among some 200 people on board was Belisario Porras, the president of Panama. Grand celebrations had been planned, but the First World War had just broken out in Europe and the opening was a quiet affair. The canal spared ships the long and dangerous voyage around the tip of South America.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Smithsonian National Museum of American History: It’s your birthday, Panama Canal! ↗
1960The Republic of the Congo becomes independent from France
France claimed the lands on the north bank of the Congo River in the 1880s, after the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza signed treaties with the Teke king Makoko, and the riverside post that took Brazza’s name became the capital of French Equatorial Africa. In 1940 Brazzaville served as the capital of Charles de Gaulle’s Free France. After the war the colony, then known as Middle Congo, won its own assembly, and in 1958 it became an autonomous republic within the French Community.
Independence was proclaimed on 15 August 1960. The first president was Fulbert Youlou, a former Catholic priest from the Pool region around Brazzaville, who had been elected by the National Assembly. His rule was marked by ethnic rivalry and growing anger over corruption, and in August 1963, after three days of strikes and protests in the capital, he was forced to resign. The country, often called Congo-Brazzaville to set it apart from its larger neighbour across the river, still celebrates 15 August as its national day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Department of State, Office of the Historian: Republic of the Congo ↗
1248The foundation stone of Cologne Cathedral is laid
In 1164 Rainald of Dassel, Archbishop of Cologne, brought home from Milan the relics said to be those of the Three Kings, a prize given to him by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Pilgrims poured into the city, and the old cathedral was soon too small for them. The archbishops decided to replace it with a church in the new Gothic style then rising in France, built to house a golden shrine for the relics.
On 15 August 1248, the feast of the Assumption, Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden laid the foundation stone. The great choir was finished in 1322, but work slowed and then stopped altogether in the 16th century, leaving a stump of a south tower with a wooden crane on top that stood for centuries. Building began again in 1842, following the medieval plans, and the cathedral was completed in 1880, 632 years after it was begun. Its twin spires, 157 metres high, made it for a few years the tallest building in the world, and it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Cologne Cathedral: History ↗
