1960Cyprus becomes an independent republic
Britain took over the running of Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, annexed it in 1914 and made it a crown colony in 1925. Most Greek Cypriots wanted enosis, union with Greece, while the Turkish Cypriot minority looked to Turkey and came to call for partition. In 1955 the Greek Cypriot underground organisation EOKA began an armed campaign against British rule, and the island slid into years of bombings, reprisals and emergency law.
In 1959 Greece, Turkey and Britain agreed a settlement at Zürich and London: Cyprus would be neither Greek nor Turkish but an independent state, with power shared between the two communities. On 16 August 1960 the Republic of Cyprus was proclaimed, with Archbishop Makarios III as president and Fazıl Küçük as vice-president, while Britain kept two military base areas on the south coast. The power-sharing constitution broke down in fighting in 1963, and UN peacekeepers arrived the following year. Cyprus marks its Independence Day not in August but on 1 October.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Government of Cyprus: Council of Ministers, background ↗
1975Gough Whitlam hands land back to the Gurindji
On 23 August 1966 Vincent Lingiari led about 200 Gurindji stockmen, house servants and their families off the British-owned Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory, in protest at their pay and treatment. The strike soon became something larger: the Gurindji set up camp at Wattie Creek, on their own country, and asked for part of their traditional land to be returned. They held out for years, winning support from unions, students and churchgoers across Australia.
On 16 August 1975 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam came to Daguragu to hand the Gurindji a lease over part of the station. As he gave Lingiari the deeds, he poured a handful of red earth into his palm, a sign, he said, that the land belonged to the Gurindji and their children for ever. Mervyn Bishop’s photograph of the moment became one of the best known in Australian history. The walk-off and the handback helped bring about the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Museum of Australia: Wave Hill walk-off ↗
1896Gold is found on Bonanza Creek, starting the Klondike rush
In the summer of 1896 the American prospector George Carmack was fishing and cutting timber near the mouth of the Klondike River in Canada’s far north-west with his wife Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack), her brother Keish, known as Skookum Jim, and their nephew Káa Goox, known as Dawson Charlie, all members of the Tagish First Nation. Acting on a tip from another prospector, Robert Henderson, they went up a small tributary then called Rabbit Creek.
On the afternoon of 16 August 1896 they found rich deposits of gold in the gravels of the creek, and the next day they staked their claims. The stream was renamed Bonanza Creek, and miners already in the Yukon rushed to it. When ships carrying Klondike gold reached Seattle and San Francisco in July 1897, the news set off one of the greatest stampedes in history, with tens of thousands of people setting out for the goldfields over the mountain passes and the Yukon River. A government surveyor later concluded that Carmack, Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie were the first discoverers.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Parks Canada: Original Gold Discovery, National Historic Event ↗
1819Cavalry charge a reform meeting in Manchester: the Peterloo Massacre
After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain’s northern industrial towns suffered unemployment and high bread prices, while fast-growing Manchester had no member of parliament of its own. Reformers called a great open-air meeting to demand a wider vote, and on 16 August 1819 a crowd of around 60,000 men, women and children, many in their Sunday best and marching behind banners, gathered at St Peter’s Field to hear the radical speaker Henry Hunt.
The local magistrates, alarmed by the size of the crowd, sent the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest Hunt. The inexperienced volunteer cavalry hacked their way through the crowd with sabres, and regular hussars were then ordered in to clear the field. Accounts differ: at least 11 and probably 18 people were killed, and between 400 and 700 injured. A newspaper dubbed it ‘Peterloo’ in mockery of the victory at Waterloo. Hunt was jailed, and the government passed the Six Acts to curb meetings and the radical press, but the massacre became a rallying cry for parliamentary reform.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: The National Archives: The Peterloo Massacre, 1819 ↗
1972Rebel fighter jets fire on King Hassan II’s airliner
King Hassan II of Morocco had already survived one coup attempt, in July 1971, when cadets stormed his summer palace at Skhirat during his birthday party. Afterwards he placed great trust in his interior and then defence minister, General Mohamed Oufkir, who was given wide control over the armed forces.
On 16 August 1972, as the king flew home from France in a Boeing 727, fighter jets of the Moroccan air force intercepted the airliner over the north of the country and raked it with gunfire. According to later accounts, the king’s pilot, or Hassan himself, radioed that the king was dying, and the attackers broke off. The damaged plane landed at Rabat, and the king escaped, though several people on board were killed. That night Oufkir was found dead, officially by his own hand. A US intelligence estimate the following month judged that there was good evidence he had been behind the plot.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Department of State, Office of the Historian: Special National Intelligence Estimate 61-1-72, Morocco ↗
