#TodayInHistory – August 28

August 28 – Some important events on this day.

476 👉🏼 Orestes, father of Emperor Romulus Augustulus is captured and executed by Odoacer and his followers.
When Romulus Augustulus came to power as the Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, it was but a fraction of what it had once been. The empire in the East essentially treated its Western realm as a client state. Rome itself had been sacked by barbarians twice in the fifth century.
Odoacer was a Germanic mercenary soldier for the Roman army, who when refused estates that he demanded, marched into Italy with an enormous garrison of soldiers. The previous Emperor and father of Romulus fled and was later captured and executed. Romulus, then only 16, was forced to abdicate on September 4, 476, and Odoacer became King of Italy. This would not last long however, as Odoacer was soon killed by rival barbarian factions.
Although this event is considered generally to be the end of the Western Roman Empire, at the time the event received little attention, and Rome had been subjected to control by Germanic kingdoms and barbarians for decades.
What became of Romulus Augustulus is not known. Odoacer spared him due to his young age, and it is believed he retired to a villa in southern Italy, and might possibly have lived into the early 6th century.

1189 👉🏼 Third Crusade: the Crusaders begin the Siege of Acre under Guy of Lusignan
1609 👉🏼 English explorer Henry Hudson, discovers and explores Delaware Bay
1789 👉🏼 Astronomer William Herschel discovers Saturn’s moon Enceladus
1830 👉🏼 1st American built locomotive, “Tom Thumb” races a horse-drawn car from Stockton and Stokes stagecoach company from Baltimore to Ellicott Mills. Let history record that due to mechanical problems the horse won!
1837 👉🏼 Pharmacists John Lea & William Perrins manufacture Worcestershire Sauce
1845 👉🏼 Scientific American magazine publishes its first issue

1884 👉🏼 First known photograph of a tornado is made near Howard, South Dakota.
The first photos of tornadoes only emerged in the 1880s and this image by F. N. Robinson is the best known. The image shows the tornado descending from a large storm cloud with two smaller tornadoes growing ominously out either side.
The image of this tornado was taken near Howard, South Dakota and the weather system went on to kill 4-6 people and cause considerable loses to livestock and buildings. The photo was taken with a box camera with an exposure of up to 10 minutes. Robinson later doctored the photo, as was normal then, before selling it as a postcard.

1917 👉🏼 Ten suffragists arrested as they picket the White House
1956 17th Venice Film Festival opens. No Golden Lion awarded

1963 👉🏼 Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I have a dream” speech addressing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom civil rights march at Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
It was the largest-ever civil rights gathering at the time with an estimated 250,000 people travelling from all over the US to attend. The idea for the march came originally from labor organizer A. Philip Randolph who became its chief organizer and was organized in just three months. The marchers actually started marching without their leaders, who were meeting with members of Congress, who then had to catch up to the march, where they linked arms at the head of the procession.
The march was aimed at supporting President John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill, then going through Congress. Marchers made their way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. It was there that one of the marches’ leaders Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech carried live on TV.

1965 👉🏼 Bob Dylan booed for playing electric guitar at a concert in New York’s Forest Hills
1965 👉🏼 1st Subway sandwich shop opens in Bridgeport, Connecticut
1994 👉🏼 1st Japanese gay pride parade
2019 👉🏼 Discovery of 3.8-million-year-old skull of early human ancestor Australopithecus anamensis, found by Yohannes Haile-Selassie, at Miro Dora, Ethiopia, upends previous evolutionary theory published in journal “Nature”