On August 12
No pivotal events are recorded on exactly August 12 in the Human Saga — here is the surrounding week in history.
This week in history (Aug 9 – Aug 15)
The United States detonated nuclear weapons over Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945) — the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict.
At midnight on 14–15 August 1947 the British Raj was dissolved and replaced by two independent dominions, Pakistan (14 August) and India (15 August), under the Indian Independence Act passed by the UK Parliament on 18 July 1947.
In the early hours of 13 August 1961 the government of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), with Soviet approval, began sealing the border between East and West Berlin.
On 9 August 378 CE, near Adrianople in Thrace (modern Edirne, Turkey), the eastern emperor Valens led the Roman field army against Gothic forces under Fritigern, a coalition of Therving and Greuthung Goths together with Alans and others…
Signed on 10 August 843, the Treaty of Verdun ended a bitter civil war among the grandsons of Charlemagne by dividing the Carolingian Empire among the three surviving sons of Emperor Louis the Pious.
Over three days in August 955, King Otto I of East Francia (Germany) annihilated a large invading Magyar (Hungarian) army near Augsburg on the Lech river.
On 13 August 1521 the Mexica (Aztec) capital Tenochtitlan fell to a coalition of Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés and tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, above all the Tlaxcalans.
On 15 August 1971 President Richard Nixon announced a 'New Economic Policy' that suspended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold, alongside a 90-day wage and price freeze and a temporary import surcharge.
In 1767 Empress Catherine II of Russia issued the Nakaz, or Instruction, a guiding document for the Legislative Commission convened to draft a new law code.
From 13 to 17 August 1876 Richard Wagner's complete four-opera cycle 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' was performed for the first time, inaugurating the first Bayreuth Festival in a purpose-built theatre, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, designed to…
Over the weekend of 15 to 18 August 1969, an estimated 400,000 people gathered at Max Yasgur's dairy farm near Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, billed as an Aquarian Exposition of three days of peace and music.
On 9 August 2021 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the Working Group I contribution to its Sixth Assessment Report, 'Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis'.