1963Martin Luther King Jr. tells the March on Washington of his dream
A century after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans in the South were still shut out of the vote, segregated in schools, shops and buses, and kept in the worst-paid jobs. In 1963 the veteran labour leader A. Philip Randolph and the organiser Bayard Rustin brought together the main civil rights groups, churches and trade unions to call for jobs and freedom at a great rally in the nation’s capital, as President Kennedy’s civil rights bill sat before Congress.
On 28 August 1963 about 250,000 people, Black and white, gathered at the Washington Monument and walked along the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial. It was one of the largest demonstrations the United States had ever seen, and it passed off peacefully. Near the end of the day Martin Luther King Jr. left his prepared text and spoke of his dream that his children would one day ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. The march helped build the pressure that brought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Park Service: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom ↗
1833The Slavery Abolition Act becomes law across the British Empire
Britain had banned its slave trade in 1807, but slavery itself went on in its colonies, above all on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. Through the 1820s campaigners filled Parliament with petitions, and in 1831 a great rising of enslaved people in Jamaica, the Baptist War, was crushed with great brutality. After the Reform Act of 1832 brought a new House of Commons, Lord Grey’s government brought in a bill to end slavery in most of the empire.
The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on 28 August 1833. From 1 August 1834 slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean, the Cape Colony, Mauritius and Canada, though not in territories ruled by the East India Company, and more than 800,000 people were freed in law. Freedom came with hard conditions: those over six years old were bound as unpaid ‘apprentices’ for several more years, and the government paid £20 million in compensation to the slave owners, while the people who had been enslaved received nothing. Apprenticeship was ended early, in 1838.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Slavery Abolition Act ↗
1913The Peace Palace opens in The Hague
At the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899 the great powers agreed to set up a Permanent Court of Arbitration, where states could settle their quarrels by law rather than war. The court needed a home, and the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie offered $1.5 million to build a ‘temple of peace’ for it, with a library of international law. The French architect Louis Cordonnier won the design competition, and governments around the world sent gifts of stone, wood, tapestries and art to furnish it.
On 28 August 1913, in the presence of Queen Wilhelmina, the Dutch royal family and Carnegie himself, the keys of the Peace Palace were formally handed over amid music and the ringing of bells across the city. Within a year Europe was at war. Yet the building outlasted both world wars, and since 1946 it has been the seat of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, alongside the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Hague Academy of International Law and the Peace Palace Library.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Peace Palace: History ↗
1521Süleyman the Magnificent captures Belgrade
Belgrade, where the Sava River meets the Danube, was the great southern fortress of the Kingdom of Hungary and had held out against the Ottoman Empire for generations; in 1456 John Hunyadi had beaten back a huge siege led by Sultan Mehmed II. In 1520 the young Süleyman came to the Ottoman throne, and the next year he led his first campaign north against Hungary, whose king, Louis II, was a boy and whose nobles were divided.
After a siege of several weeks, in which the walls were pounded by Ottoman guns, the small Hungarian garrison surrendered. The City of Belgrade dates the fall to 28 August 1521, though some accounts give 29 August. The loss opened the road into the heart of Hungary: five years later Süleyman destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács. Belgrade remained in Ottoman hands, with interruptions, until the last Ottoman garrison left the fortress in 1867.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: City of Belgrade: History ↗
475The Western Roman emperor Julius Nepos flees Ravenna
By the 470s the Western Roman Empire had shrunk to little more than Italy, and real power lay with the generals who commanded its largely Germanic armies. In 474 Julius Nepos, the ruler of Dalmatia on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, was sent to Italy with the backing of the Eastern emperor in Constantinople, deposed the emperor Glycerius and took the throne. He made Orestes, a Roman who had once served as secretary to Attila the Hun, his commander-in-chief and sent him with the army to Gaul.
Orestes instead turned the army against his master. According to a contemporary chronicle, on 28 August 475 Orestes entered the imperial capital of Ravenna and Nepos fled across the sea to Dalmatia. Weeks later Orestes placed his own young son Romulus on the throne, mocked as ‘Augustulus’, the little emperor. In 476 the soldier Odoacer killed Orestes and deposed the boy, the moment usually taken as the end of the Western Empire, while Nepos went on claiming the title from Dalmatia until his murder in 480.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: De Imperatoribus Romanis (Loyola University Chicago): Romulus Augustulus ↗
