August 22 – Some important events on this day.
565 👉🏼 St Columba reports seeing monster in Loch Ness
1454 👉🏼 Jews are expelled from Brunn Moravia by order of King Ladislaus
1485 👉🏼 Battle of Bosworth Field: Henry Tudor’s forces defeat English King Richard III during last battle in the Wars of the Roses. Richard is killed, the last English monarch to die in battle.
1603 👉🏼 1st stones laid in Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam
1639 👉🏼 Madras (now Chennai), India, founded by the British East India Company on sliver of land bought from local Nayak rulers
1642 👉🏼 English Civil War begins between Royalists and Parliament
1791 👉🏼 Haitian Slave Revolution begins under voodoo priest Boukman
1849 👉🏼 The first air raid in history: Austria launches pilotless balloons against the Italian city of Venice
1864 👉🏼 First Geneva Convention adopted in Geneva “for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field” signed by 12 nations.
The original 12 signatories of the Geneva Convention were:
– Swiss Confederation
– Grand Duchy of Baden
– Kingdom of Belgium
– Kingdom of Denmark
– Second French Empire
– Grand Duchy of Hesse
– Kingdom of Italy
– Kingdom of the Netherlands
– Kingdom of Portugal and the Algarves
– Kingdom of Prussia
– Kingdom of Spain
– Kingdom of WürttembergThe United Kingdom of Norway and Sweden signed in December 1864.
1932 👉🏼 BBC begins experimental regular TV broadcasts
1945 👉🏼 Vietnam conflict begins as Ho Chi Minh leads a successful coup
2004 👉🏼 “The Scream” (1910 painted version) and “Madonna”, two paintings by Edvard Munch, are stolen at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.
“The Scream” remains Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s most famous image and one of the most famous in modern art. The artist first painted it in 1893 but there are four versions, two in pastel and two in paint and a limited number of prints were also made.
Although a work in the Expressionistic style, the work depicts an actual landscape – Kristiania Fjord seen from Ekeberg near Oslo. The figure in the foreground though is ambiguous and the viewer is unable to tell if it is male, female, young or old. A year earlier Munch recorded his inspiration for the work, during a walk he wrote “I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature”.
2019 👉🏼 Russia launches Fedor, the first life-sized robot, into space to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
2019 👉🏼 Bielefeld in Germany offers €1m prize to anyone in who can prove the town doesn’t exit to disprove 25-year-old conspiracy theory