1945Fifty nations sign the United Nations Charter
Even before the Second World War was over, the Allies were planning an organisation that could keep the peace better than the League of Nations had. Proposals drawn up at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington in 1944 and refined at Yalta were taken to San Francisco, where delegates of 50 nations met from 25 April 1945 at the United Nations Conference on International Organization. For two months they argued over the details, from the powers of the Security Council to the rights of small states and colonial peoples.
On 26 June 1945, the last day of the conference, the delegates signed the finished Charter, together with the Statute of the new International Court of Justice. Its preamble opens with the words ‘We the peoples of the United Nations’, determined to save later generations from the scourge of war. Poland, which had not been represented, signed later as the 51st founding member. The Charter came into force on 24 October 1945, once enough countries had ratified it, and that date is now kept as United Nations Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: United Nations: The San Francisco Conference ↗
1960Madagascar becomes independent from France
France conquered Madagascar in the 1890s, ending the Merina kingdom that had ruled much of the island, and in 1947 it put down a large uprising at the cost of many thousands of lives. After the Second World War, though, French Africa moved step by step towards self-government. In 1958 the island voted to become an autonomous republic within the French Community, and the schoolteacher-turned-politician Philibert Tsiranana, whose Social Democratic Party drew its strength from the coastal peoples, became its leader.
Negotiations with Paris followed, and on 26 June 1960 Madagascar became fully independent as the Malagasy Republic, with Tsiranana as its first president. It was one of the many African countries that gained independence in 1960. Tsiranana kept close ties with France and governed until 1972, when protests forced him from power. Madagascar celebrates 26 June as its national day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Philibert Tsiranana ↗
1963Kennedy tells West Berlin ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’
In August 1961 East Germany sealed off West Berlin with barbed wire and then a concrete wall, cutting families apart and leaving the western half of the city an island inside communist territory. Two years later President John F. Kennedy made a tour of West Germany, and on 26 June 1963 he spent a day in West Berlin. He looked over the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate and at Checkpoint Charlie before driving to the Rathaus Schöneberg, West Berlin’s city hall.
From its steps he spoke to a crowd of hundreds of thousands in the square below. Challenging anyone who doubted the difference between the free world and the communist one, he repeated ‘Let them come to Berlin’, and he ended by saying that all free people, wherever they lived, were citizens of Berlin, and so he too took pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. The speech became one of the best-remembered of the Cold War, and the square where it was given was later renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: JFK Library: Remarks at the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin, 26 June 1963 ↗
1541Francisco Pizarro is killed in Lima
Francisco Pizarro and his partner Diego de Almagro led the small Spanish force that overthrew the Inca Empire in the 1530s. The two soon fell out over the spoils, above all over who should rule the old Inca capital of Cuzco. The quarrel became a civil war among the conquerors, and in 1538 Almagro was defeated and executed on the orders of Pizarro’s brother Hernando.
Almagro’s followers gathered around his son, also called Diego, in Lima, the city Pizarro had founded in 1535 as his capital. Poor, watched and fearing they would be eliminated, they struck first. On 26 June 1541 a band of them burst into Pizarro’s palace and killed the old governor after a desperate fight. The younger Almagro declared himself governor of Peru, but a royal official defeated him in battle the next year and he was executed.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Francisco Pizarro ↗
1483Richard III takes the English throne
When Edward IV died in April 1483, his elder son became king as Edward V at the age of twelve, and the late king’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was named Protector. Within weeks Richard had seized control of the boy, arrested or executed rivals, and lodged Edward and his younger brother in the Tower of London. On 22 June a preacher in London declared that Edward IV’s marriage had been invalid and his children illegitimate, and on 25 June an assembly of lords and commons asked Richard to take the crown.
On 26 June 1483 Richard accepted, and his reign as Richard III was dated from that day; he was crowned at Westminster on 6 July. The two princes were never seen in public again, and their fate has been argued over ever since. Richard ruled for barely two years before he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, the last English king to die in battle.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Richard III, usurpation ↗
