1968Warsaw Pact tanks roll into Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring
In January 1968 Alexander Dubček became leader of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party and began a programme he called ‘socialism with a human face’. Censorship was eased, newspapers and radio spoke freely, and citizens debated reforms that had been unthinkable a few months earlier. In Moscow and in neighbouring Communist capitals, leaders who remembered Hungary in 1956 feared that the ‘Prague Spring’ would spread and loosen their grip on Eastern Europe.
On the night of 20 to 21 August 1968 some 200,000 troops of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, with a token East German presence, crossed the border under the cover of Warsaw Pact exercises. They seized Prague, the main cities and the radio and transport links within hours. Czechoslovaks met the tanks with argument, painted slogans and switched-round road signs rather than armed resistance, but 137 people are thought to have been killed. Dubček was flown to Moscow and forced to reverse his reforms, and Soviet troops stayed in the country until 1991.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Office of the Historian: Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968 ↗
1960Senegal breaks away from the Mali Federation
As France’s West African colonies moved towards self-rule, some of their leaders hoped to hold together in a larger union. In 1959 Senegal and the Sudanese Republic, today’s Mali, joined to form the Mali Federation, named after the medieval empire of the western Sahel. Other territories stayed out, and the two partners, led by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Mamadou Dia in Dakar and Modibo Keïta in Bamako, soon disagreed over how the federation should be run and who should lead it.
The Mali Federation became independent on 20 June 1960, but it lasted only two months. On 20 August 1960, after a crisis over the federal presidency and control of the army, Senegal’s assembly declared the country’s own independence, and Keïta and his Sudanese ministers were sent home to Bamako by train. Senghor became Senegal’s first president that September, and on 22 September the Sudanese Republic proclaimed itself the Republic of Mali.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Mali Federation ↗
636Arab armies defeat the Byzantines at the Yarmuk and win Syria
Within a few years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the armies of the new Muslim state had burst out of Arabia into the Byzantine province of Syria and taken Damascus. The emperor Heraclius gathered a large army of Byzantine troops and allies to drive them out, and the Arab commanders pulled back to unite their forces near the Yarmuk River, a tributary of the Jordan, on today’s border between Syria and Jordan.
The battle lasted six days. Britannica dates its start to 20 August 636, while many other accounts make 20 August the final and decisive day. Under the generalship of Khalid ibn al-Walid, the Arab forces broke the Byzantine army, and many fleeing soldiers died in the steep ravines around the battlefield. Byzantine rule in Syria was over, Jerusalem surrendered soon afterwards, and the victory opened the way for the rapid spread of the early caliphate across the Middle East.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Yarmouk ↗
1905Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary league is founded in Tokyo
By the early 1900s many young Chinese had lost faith in the ability of the Qing dynasty to reform and defend the country. Thousands of them were studying in Japan, and Tokyo became a meeting place for exiles and radicals. Several revolutionary groups had grown up separately, among them Sun Yat-sen’s Revive China Society, Huang Xing’s China Revival Society and the Restoration Society.
On 20 August 1905 about a hundred delegates met in Tokyo and merged these groups into a single Revolutionary Alliance, the Tongmenghui, with Sun as its leader and Huang Xing as his deputy. Its programme called for driving out the Manchu rulers, restoring Chinese rule, founding a republic and sharing land fairly. The league published its own newspaper and organised a string of risings in southern China; most failed, but the Wuchang rising of October 1911 brought down the dynasty, and in 1912 the Tongmenghui became the core of the new Nationalist Party.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: China, reformist and revolutionist movements at the end of the dynasty ↗
1860Burke and Wills set out from Melbourne to cross Australia
In 1860 the colony of Victoria, rich from gold, set out to send the first expedition right across Australia from south to north, from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Its leader was Robert O’Hara Burke, an Irish-born police officer with no experience of exploring, and his surveyor and later second-in-command was William John Wills. The expedition was lavishly supplied, with horses, wagons and camels imported from India, and some 20 tonnes of equipment.
On 20 August 1860 the party left Royal Park in Melbourne, watched by about 15,000 people. Slowed by its baggage and by quarrels, the expedition split up, and in February 1861 Burke, Wills and two companions reached the tidal mangroves near the Gulf. On the way back, Burke and Wills died of hunger and exhaustion near Cooper Creek. Only John King survived, cared for by the Yandruwandha people until a rescue party found him.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Museum of Australia: Burke and Wills ↗
