1980The New Hebrides become the independent Republic of Vanuatu
For most of the 20th century the New Hebrides, a chain of some 80 islands in the south-west Pacific, were ruled not by one colonial power but by two. From 1906 Britain and France ran them jointly as a condominium, with two sets of police, two school systems, two currencies and two legal codes, alongside a joint court for disputes between them. Islanders’ land had been bought up by planters and traders, and by the 1970s the Vanua’aku Pati, led by the Anglican priest Walter Lini, was pressing hard for independence.
Britain and France agreed at a conference in Paris in 1977, and elections gave Lini’s party a majority. The last months were troubled: in mid-1980 Jimmy Stevens and his Nagriamel movement tried to break the large island of Espiritu Santo away from the new state. Even so, on 30 July 1980 the New Hebrides became independent within the Commonwealth as the Republic of Vanuatu, with Lini as its first prime minister. Troops from Papua New Guinea soon helped end the Santo rebellion, and 30 July is Vanuatu’s national day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Vanuatu, history ↗
762Work begins on Baghdad, the Abbasid caliph’s Round City
The Abbasid dynasty seized the caliphate from the Umayyads in 750 and wanted a capital of its own, away from Syria. The second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, chose a site on the west bank of the Tigris, where the river runs close to the Euphrates, with trade routes by water and land. He called his city Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, although it kept the name of the old village on the spot, Baghdad.
Al-Mansur’s astrologers, Nawbakht and Mashallah, chose the most favourable moment to begin, and building started on 30 July 762. The city was laid out as a perfect circle, about 2.7 kilometres across, with ringed walls, four gates facing the corners of the empire and the caliph’s palace and great mosque at the centre. Baghdad grew far beyond its walls to become one of the largest and richest cities in the world, although nothing of the Round City survives today.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Baghdad, history ↗
1419Hussites throw Prague’s councillors from the New Town Hall
Jan Hus, a Prague preacher who attacked the wealth and corruption of the Church, was burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. His death enraged many Czechs, and his followers, the Hussites, grew bolder. In 1419 King Wenceslas IV, under pressure from the Church, filled Prague’s New Town council with men hostile to them, and several Hussites were arrested.
On 30 July 1419 the radical priest Jan Želivský led a procession through the New Town to the town hall on what is now Charles Square to demand their release. When a stone was thrown at the marchers from a window, the crowd stormed the building and threw the burgomaster and councillors out of the windows; those who survived the fall were killed by the people below, about seven in all. The king died a few weeks later, and the Hussite Wars that followed lasted until the 1430s.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Radio Prague International: The First Defenestration of Prague, what was it and why did it happen? ↗
1619Virginia’s first General Assembly meets in Jamestown church
Twelve years after the founding of Jamestown, the Virginia Company in London was trying to attract more settlers and investors to its struggling colony. Among its reforms, it told the new governor, Sir George Yeardley, to let the colonists help make their own laws. Yeardley called on each of the colony’s 11 settlements to choose two burgesses to represent them.
On 30 July 1619 the 22 burgesses met the governor and his six councillors in the choir of the newly built wooden church at Jamestown, with John Pory, who had sat in the English Parliament, as speaker. In a session of six days, cut short by summer heat and sickness, they passed laws on tobacco prices, idleness, gambling and drunkenness, and on relations with the Powhatan people. It was the first representative assembly in English North America, although only free men of property had a voice, and its successor, the Virginia General Assembly, still meets today.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Park Service, Historic Jamestowne: The First Legislative Assembly ↗
