1757Robert Clive wins the Battle of Plassey
In 1756 Siraj-ud-Daulah, the young Nawab of Bengal, seized the British East India Company’s trading post at Calcutta. Robert Clive was sent from Madras to win it back, and he did so early in 1757. But Clive wanted more than a trading post. He and a group of Bengal’s powerful bankers plotted with Mir Jafar, one of the nawab’s own generals, promising to make him nawab if Siraj was beaten.
On 23 June 1757 the two armies met in a mango grove at Plassey, north of Calcutta. Clive had about 3,000 men against a force of around 50,000, but Mir Jafar held his cavalry back from the fight. A heavy storm soaked the nawab’s gunpowder while the British kept theirs covered, and by the end of the day Siraj’s army had broken. Mir Jafar was made nawab and Siraj was soon killed. The victory turned a trading company into the real power in Bengal, and it is often seen as the start of British rule in India.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Army Museum: Battle of Plassey ↗
1802Humboldt climbs higher than anyone before him on Chimborazo
The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the French botanist Aimé Bonpland spent five years travelling through Spain’s American empire, measuring, collecting and mapping as they went. In 1802 they reached the Andes of what is now Ecuador, where the snow-capped volcano Chimborazo was then believed to be the highest mountain in the world.
On 23 June 1802 they set out to climb it, with no ropes, crampons or oxygen. Suffering badly from altitude sickness, they were stopped by a deep ravine short of the summit, but they had reached nearly 5,900 metres, a height no one was known to have climbed before, and the record stood for about 30 years. Humboldt turned the ordeal into science: he was among the first to link mountain sickness to the thin air, and his famous drawing of Chimborazo, showing how plants change with height, helped found the study of how life is spread across the Earth.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Alexander von Humboldt ↗
1919Estonian and Latvian troops win the Battle of Cēsis
After the First World War, the new republics of Estonia and Latvia fought for their survival against the Red Army and against the Baltische Landeswehr, a force raised by the Baltic German nobility with help from German troops. In the spring of 1919 the Landeswehr took Riga and pushed north, hoping to put the region under German-led rule.
Around the small town of Cēsis in northern Latvia, known to Estonians as Võnnu, the Estonian 3rd Division, the Kuperjanov Battalion, armoured trains and the Latvian Northern Brigade stood against them. The Landeswehr’s main attack was held on 21 June, and on 23 June 1919 an Estonian counter-attack retook Cēsis and drove the Germans back towards Riga. The victory ended the hopes of a German-dominated Baltic state, after some 600 years of Baltic German power in the region. Estonia marks 23 June as Victory Day, and Latvia also honours the battle.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: ERR News: June 23, Estonia’s Victory Day ↗
1908The shah’s Cossacks shell Iran’s parliament
In 1906 a revolution forced Iran’s Qajar ruler to grant a constitution and an elected parliament, the Majles. His son Mohammad Ali Shah, who came to the throne in 1907, was determined to undo it, and he had the backing of Russia and of the Persian Cossack Brigade, a force commanded by Russian officers.
On 22 June 1908 the shah made the brigade’s Russian commander, Colonel Vladimir Liakhov, military governor of Tehran. The next day, 23 June, the Cossacks surrounded the parliament building with artillery and, when fighting began, shelled it and a neighbouring mosque. Several hundred people were killed, the Majles was shut and leading constitutionalists were arrested or executed. The victory did not last: supporters of the constitution fought back from Tabriz and the provinces, took Tehran in 1909 and deposed the shah.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Iranica: Cossack Brigade ↗
1985A bomb destroys Air India Flight 182
Air India Flight 182, a Boeing 747 named Kanishka, left Canada for London and Delhi on 22 June 1985. A bomb hidden in a suitcase had been checked in at Vancouver and transferred onto the flight. On 23 June 1985, as the plane approached Ireland, the bomb exploded and the aircraft fell into the Atlantic off the south-west Irish coast. All 329 people on board were killed, most of them Canadians of Indian origin.
Less than an hour earlier, a second bomb from the same plot exploded at Tokyo’s Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers. The attacks were blamed on Sikh extremists; only one man was ever convicted. A Canadian public inquiry later found a ‘cascading series of errors’ by police and security agencies. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Canada’s history, and Canada marks 23 June as its National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Public Safety Canada: Remembering Air India Flight 182 ↗
