On This Day

Historical events, cultural moments & moments that shaped today.

Every day, something happened.

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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📅 On this day in 2005 - 21 years ago:

Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana - the levees failed, 80% of New Orleans went underwater, and some 1,400 people died in America's costliest natural disaster.

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🎂 Born on this day in 1923 - 103 years ago:

Richard Attenborough - actor, then Oscar-winning director of Gandhi: a film whose funeral scene used some 300,000 extras, still a record.

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🎂 Born on this day in 1958 - 68 years ago:

Michael Jackson - the King of Pop: Thriller remains the best-selling album ever made, and the moonwalk still defies physics.

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📅 On this day in 1966 - 60 years ago:

Egypt executed Sayyid Qutb for plotting against Nasser - his prison writings became the intellectual foundation of modern jihadism.

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📅 On this day in 1526 - 500 years ago:

At Moh��cs, Suleiman the Magnificent's cannons annihilated Hungary's army in two hours - the king drowned while fleeing, and the Ottomans would rule central Hungary for 150 years.

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🕯️ 10 years ago today, in 2016, we lost:

Gene Wilder - Willy Wonka, Young Frankenstein, The Producers: comedy's gentlest madman.

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📅 On this day in 1842 - 184 years ago:

Britain and China signed the Treaty of Nanking, ending the First Opium War - China paid millions, opened five ports, and handed over a small island called Hong Kong.

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📅 On this day in 1997 - 29 years ago:

Netflix launched - as a DVD-by-mail rental service. Blockbuster later passed on buying it for $50 million.

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📅 On this day in 1966 - 60 years ago:

The Beatles played Candlestick Park, San Francisco - 33 minutes, inaudible over the screaming. They never played a paid concert again.

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📅 On this day in 1949 - 77 years ago:

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb - years earlier than Washington expected, thanks partly to spies inside the Manhattan Project. The arms race was on.

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📅 On this day in 1963 - 63 years ago:

'I have a dream' - Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to 250,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The March on Washington's closing speech became the defining words of the civil rights movement.

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📅 On this day in 1810 - 216 years ago:

The trapped British squadron at Grand Port surrendered - completing the French navy's finest hour of the Napoleonic Wars.

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📅 On this day in 1867 - 159 years ago:

The United States took possession of an empty atoll called Midway - seventy-five years later, it would give its name to one of history's decisive battles.

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📅 On this day in 1990 - 36 years ago:

Saddam Hussein declared Kuwait Iraq's '19th province' - an annexation no nation recognized, and a coalition reversed within seven months.

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📅 On this day in 1996 - 30 years ago:

Charles and Diana's divorce became final - 15 years after a fairy-tale wedding watched by 750 million. Diana kept Kensington Palace but lost 'Her Royal Highness'. A year later she was dead in Paris.

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📅 On this day in 1937 - 89 years ago:

Toyota became an independent company - a spinoff from a loom maker; the family tweaked the name from Toyoda because it took fewer brush strokes and sounded luckier.

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🕯️ 6 years ago today, in 2020, we lost:

Chadwick Boseman - Black Panther, Jackie Robinson, James Brown - died at 43 of a cancer he had kept private through four years of filming.

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🕯️ 71 years ago today, in 1955, we lost:

Emmett Till, 14, was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His mother insisted on an open casket - and the photographs helped ignite the civil rights movement.

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🎂 Born on this day in 1749 - 277 years ago:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust, Werther, and a mind so vast his name still means universal genius. Napoleon insisted on meeting him and walked away saying: 'There is a man!'

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📅 On this day in 1914 - 112 years ago:

In the war's first naval battle, the Royal Navy sank three German cruisers in the Heligoland Bight - and the Kaiser ordered his precious fleet to keep to port.