On August 21
No pivotal events are recorded on exactly August 21 in the Human Saga — here is the surrounding week in history.
This week in history (Aug 18 – Aug 24)
On the night of 22 August 1791, following a clandestine vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman associated with the leader Dutty Boukman, enslaved people across the northern plain of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt, burning plantations and seizing…
The Battle of Stalingrad was fought from 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943 between German and Soviet forces for control of the city on the Volga.
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE buried the Campanian towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae under metres of ash, pumice and pyroclastic surges, killing thousands and freezing daily Roman life in place.
On 24 August 410 CE the Visigoths under their king Alaric entered Rome and plundered the city for three days, the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy in nearly 800 years.
On 23 August 1514 the Ottoman Sultan Selim I crushed the Safavid army of Shah Ismail I at Chaldiran in northwestern Iran.
Beginning at dawn on 24 August 1572 in Paris, Catholic mobs and royal forces slaughtered French Protestants (Huguenots) who had gathered for the wedding of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to Margaret of Valois.
On 20 August 1897, while working in Secunderabad in British India, the army surgeon Ronald Ross dissected an Anopheles mosquito that had fed days earlier on a malaria patient and found the malarial parasite developing within cells of the…
The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of sex.
On 19 August 1953 Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown in a coup organised by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, under the codename Operation Boot) and the American Central…
On 22 August 1948, representatives of 147 churches from 44 countries gathered in Amsterdam to inaugurate the World Council of Churches (WCC), a fellowship of churches affirming Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.