1966British Guiana becomes the independent nation of Guyana
British Guiana, on the north-eastern shoulder of South America, had been a British colony since the early 1800s, its sugar estates worked first by enslaved Africans and later by indentured labourers brought mostly from India. After the Second World War a strong independence movement grew up, led at first by Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, but bitter political divisions and British and American suspicion of Jagan’s left-wing politics slowed the road to self-rule.
In 1964 a coalition led by Burnham took office, and Britain’s Parliament passed the Guyana Independence Act in May 1966. The Act came into force on 26 May, when the Union Jack was lowered and the new Golden Arrowhead flag raised in Georgetown. The colony took the name Guyana, an Amerindian word often translated as ‘land of many waters’, and the first National Assembly of the new country met the same day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Guyana, Independence ↗
1908Oil gushes from the ground at Masjed Soleyman
In 1901 the British-Australian financier William Knox D’Arcy won a sixty-year concession from the Shah of Persia to search for oil across much of the country. His engineer, George Reynolds, spent years drilling in harsh and remote country without success, and by 1908 the money was running out. The backers told Reynolds to prepare to stop work, but he kept drilling at a site in the south-west known as Masjed Soleyman.
In the early hours of 26 May 1908 the drill struck oil, and a gusher shot high above the rig. It was the first major commercial oil find in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed the following year to exploit it, and later grew into BP. The discovery transformed Iran’s economy and politics, and marked the start of the region’s central place in the world’s oil supply.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Iranica: D’Arcy, William Knox ↗
1918Georgia declares its independence in Tbilisi
Georgia, in the southern Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas, had been absorbed into the Russian Empire in the early 1800s. When that empire collapsed in the revolutions of 1917, the peoples of the Caucasus first tried a short-lived joint federation. As it broke apart under the pressure of war with the Ottoman Empire, Georgian leaders decided to go their own way.
On 26 May 1918 the Georgian National Council in Tbilisi adopted the Act of Independence, creating the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Led by Social Democrats under Noe Zhordania, it held multi-party elections and in 1921 adopted a constitution, before the Red Army invaded and the country was absorbed into Soviet rule. Georgia restored its independence in 1991, and 26 May is now its national Independence Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Archives of Georgia: The First Democratic Republic of Georgia ↗
1940The evacuation from Dunkirk begins
In May 1940 the German army swept through the Low Countries and into France, and its armoured columns raced to the English Channel, cutting off the British Expeditionary Force together with French and Belgian troops in a shrinking pocket around the port of Dunkirk. With surrender or destruction looming, the British government ordered an evacuation by sea, codenamed Operation Dynamo, which began on the evening of 26 May.
The operation was run by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay from tunnels deep in the cliffs at Dover. Warships and hundreds of civilian vessels, from ferries to fishing boats and pleasure craft, crossed under air attack to lift men from the harbour and the beaches. Planners hoped to save perhaps 45,000; by 4 June more than 338,000 British and Allied troops had been brought home, though most of their equipment was left behind.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Imperial War Museums: What you need to know about the Dunkirk evacuations ↗
1972Nixon and Brezhnev sign the first great arms control deal
By the late 1960s the United States and the Soviet Union each had enough nuclear missiles to destroy the other many times over, and both were beginning to build defences designed to shoot incoming warheads down. Strategists feared that such shields would only spur a new and costly race to build more missiles to overwhelm them. In 1969 the two sides opened the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to try to halt the spiral.
On 26 May 1972, during the first visit by an American president to Moscow, Richard Nixon and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, together with an interim agreement freezing numbers of offensive missiles. Each side was allowed only a small number of missile-defence sites. It was the high point of the thaw known as détente, and the treaty lasted thirty years until the United States withdrew in 2002.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Department of State, Office of the Historian: Strategic Arms Limitations Talks/Treaty (SALT) I and II ↗
