A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on August 20th. For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On either August 20 or September 8-10, 480 BC, the Persians defeated the Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae. On August 20, 1858, naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the change of organisms over time through mutation and natural selection, in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. On August 20, 1882, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture made…
Read More
A Brief History On August 20, 1995, a horrific rail accident occurred on India’s Northern Railway. Known as the “Firozabad rail collision,” a train carrying 2,200 sleeping passengers ran into another train that stopped after hitting a giant Nilgai antelope. Officially 358 people died, although the count may have been higher. Digging Deeper There have been far worse rail accidents, including the “Bihar Train Disaster” in India of 1981, in which 500 to 800 people died, the 1917 “Ciurea Rail Disaster” in Romania which cost over 700 lives, and another 1917 disaster, the “Maurienne Derailment” in France, when 800 to…
A Brief History On August 17, 2023, we went and saw Meg 2: The Trench in 3D (RealD) as big monsters certainly deserve a big screen! We strongly recommend seeing such epic flicks on the big screen to get the entire movie experience from the film. To kill the suspense, yes, we liked the movie. Digging Deeper Despite criticism from reviewers picking the movie apart, you must remember, the film is not a documentary. Based on the 1999 novel, The Trench, by Steve Allen, you have to have a willful suspension of disbelief such as with movies like Godzilla or…
A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on August 19th. For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On August 19, 1612, three women from Samlesbury in Lancashire, England were put on trial for witchcraft. A letter written on August 19, 1665 or 1666 was found inside the cover of The Voynich manuscript, an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. On August 19, 1839, the government of France announced that the “Daguerreotype process,” an invention of Louis Daguerre as…
A Brief History On August 19, 1991, leader of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev was placed under arrest while on vacation in Foros, Ukraine. This first step in the action called “The August Coup” was the first step that resulted in the dissolution of the largest country in the world. Digging Deeper The USSR was formed in 1922 from the Russian Empire that disintegrated during World War I and included much of the old empire plus new territory to create a giant communist country consisting of a federation of 15 national republics. The Western democracies had an uneasy relationship with the…