History
Wright Brothers Day
At 10:35 on the morning of 17 December 1903, on a wind-scoured stretch of dune near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright lay prone on the lower …
Topic
History
Historic anniversaries, independence and national days, and moments of remembrance from around the world.
79 articles
History
Victory over Japan Day
At noon on 15 August 1945, Japanese radio carried something no listener had ever heard before: the recorded voice of Emperor Hirohito. Speaking in a …
History
Victory in Europe Day
At three o’clock on the afternoon of 8 May 1945, Winston Churchill’s voice came over the wireless to tell Britain that the war in Europe …
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Victory day of Bangladesh
At about 4.30 in the afternoon on 16 December 1971, on the open grass of the Ramna Race Course in Dhaka, Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi …
History
Veterans Day
At eleven o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent. The armistice signed that morning in a railway …
History
US Independence Day
On 3 July 1776, John Adams sat down to write to his wife Abigail and made one of the most confident wrong predictions in American history. The second …
History
United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities
On 14 December 1992, with resolution 47/3, the United Nations General Assembly fixed 3 December as the annual day on which the world would turn its …
History
United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
The 26th of June carries a double weight in the history of human rights. On that date in 1945, in San Francisco, the United Nations Charter was …
History
Unesco International Day for Tolerance
On 16 November 1995, in Paris, the member states of UNESCO signed the Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, a document drafted to mark fifty years …
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Texas Independence Day
On the morning of 2 March 1836, in an unfinished building at Washington-on-the-Brazos with no glass in the windows and a cold north wind cutting …
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Swedish Nobel Day
On 27 November 1895, in the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signed a will so short and so audacious that the lawyers who later read it …
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Star Wars Day
On 4 May 1979, the day after Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister, her Conservative Party ran a celebratory message in …
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Sri Lanka Independence Day
At dawn on 4 February 1948, in the colonial capital of Colombo, the Union Jack came down and the lion banner of a new dominion rose in its place. The …
History
Rosa Parks Day
At about half past five on the evening of 1 December 1955, a 42-year-old seamstress named Rosa Louise Parks boarded a Cleveland Avenue bus in …
History
Remembrance of the Dead
At eight o’clock on the evening of 4 May, trams stop in the middle of the street, conversations break off mid-sentence, and a country of …
History
Remembrance Day
At eleven o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne in northern France, the armistice between …
History
Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day
At seven o’clock on the evening of 15 October, in a sequence repeated across every time zone, a candle is lit. An hour later, as that time …
History
Nelson Mandela International Day
On Robben Island, the prisoner registered as 466/64 — number 466, admitted in 1964 — was not permitted to be called by his name. He broke rock in a …
History
Myanmar Independence Day
At twenty minutes past four in the morning on 4 January 1948, while most of the country was still asleep, Burma became an independent nation. The hour …
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Mexican Independence Day
At around half past two on the morning of 16 September 1810, in the small town of Dolores in Guanajuato, a parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo y …
History
Juneteenth
On 19 June 1865, Major General Gordon Granger stepped ashore at Galveston, Texas, at the head of some 2,000 Union troops, and read aloud a document …
History
Intersex Day of Remembrance
On 8 November 1838, in the small French town of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, a child was born and registered as a girl named Herculine Adélaïde Barbin. …
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International Journalists Day of remembrance
On the afternoon of 16 October 2017, the Maltese investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia drove away from her home near the village of Bidnija. …
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International Holocaust Remembrance Day
On the afternoon of 27 January 1945, soldiers of the Soviet Red Army reached the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland. The SS had marched …
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International Day to End Obstetric Fistula
In 1959, an Australian obstetrician named Catherine Hamlin answered an advertisement in The Lancet. The Ethiopian government was looking for doctors …
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International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists
On 2 November 2013, two journalists from Radio France Internationale, Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon, were seized outside a house in Kidal, in …
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International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation
On 6 February 2003, Stella Obasanjo, the First Lady of Nigeria, stood before a conference in Addis Ababa and signed a declaration in her own name. …
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International Day of Womens Health
In May 1987, activists gathered in Costa Rica for the fourth International Women’s Health Meeting and made a decision that has echoed for nearly …
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International Day of UN Peacekeepers
On 29 May 1948, a handful of unarmed military observers reported for duty in the Middle East to watch over a fragile truce between the newly declared …
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International Day of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples
There are roughly 476 million Indigenous people alive today, scattered across some 90 countries, and between them they speak the overwhelming majority …
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International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances
On Thursday 30 April 1977, fourteen women walked into the Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires, in front of the seat of Argentina’s military …
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International Day of Sport for Development and Peace
On 6 April 1896, in a restored marble stadium in Athens, the first Olympic Games of the modern era opened before a crowd of tens of thousands. The …
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International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted on resolution 181, the Partition Plan, which proposed dividing British Mandate …
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International Day of Solidarity with Detained and Missing Staff Members
On 25 March 1985, armed men seized a 64-year-old British journalist on the streets of Beirut. Alec Collett was on assignment for the United Nations …
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International Day of Rural Women
In September 1995, in a conference hall in Beijing, delegates to the Fourth World Conference on Women argued over a problem that statistics kept …
History
International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the
Stand on the Visitors’ Plaza of the United Nations headquarters in New York and you will find a sculpture of polished grey marble shaped like …
History
International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda
On the evening of 6 April 1994, a small jet carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down as it approached the airport at …
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International Day of Peace
Each 21 September, in the garden on the north side of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the Secretary-General strikes a bell. It is not a …
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International Day of Older Persons
In the summer of 1982, delegates gathered in Vienna for an unusual sort of summit. There were no border disputes to settle and no treaty to sign in …
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International Day of Nowruz
On a low table somewhere in Tehran, Tashkent or a flat in north London, seven things are laid out with care: sprouted wheat in a dish, a sweet …
History
International Day of Non-Violence
On 12 March 1930, a thin man of sixty in a homespun loincloth walked out of the Sabarmati Ashram with seventy-eight volunteers and set off on foot …
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International Day of No Prostitution
In 2002, a group of feminist activists in the United States who had themselves survived the sex trade decided that the realities they had lived …
History
International Day of Human Space Flight
At 9:07 on the morning of 12 April 1961, a Vostok-K rocket lifted off from the steppe of Baikonur in Soviet Kazakhstan carrying a 27-year-old air …
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International Day of Happiness
In 1972, the young King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, made a remark that would echo far beyond his small Himalayan kingdom: Gross National …
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International Day of Friendship
On the evening of 20 July 1958, a Paraguayan physician named Ramón Artemio Bracho sat down to dinner with a handful of friends in Puerto Pinasco, a …
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International Day of Forests
The idea of giving forests a day of their own is older than the day itself. As far back as November 1971, at the sixteenth session of the Conference …
History
International Day of Families
In 1989 the United Nations General Assembly, through resolution 44/82, declared that 1994 would be the International Year of the Family. It was an …
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International Day of Democracy
In September 1997, delegates from the world’s parliaments met in Cairo and signed a document called the Universal Declaration on Democracy. It …
History
International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the
In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin needed a word for a crime that had no name. Working in exile in the United States after fleeing …
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International Day of Charity
When Mother Teresa died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997, the woman the world knew by that name had been born eighty-seven years earlier in Skopje as …
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International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons
On 25 October 1955, a twelve-year-old girl named Sadako Sasaki died in a Hiroshima hospital of leukaemia, ten years after the atomic bomb fell on her …
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International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human
On 24 March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was standing at the altar of a small chapel in San Salvador, raising the chalice during evening …
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International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition
On the night of 22 to 23 August 1791, on the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, enslaved men and women set the cane fields alight and turned on …
History
International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer
In 1974, two chemists at the University of California, Irvine, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, published a paper with an alarming conclusion: …
History
International Day for the Eradication of Poverty
On 17 October 1987, around a hundred thousand people gathered on the Plaza of Human Rights and Liberties at the Trocadéro in Paris, in the open square …
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International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women
On the evening of 25 November 1960, a jeep was found at the bottom of a 150-foot ravine on a mountain road near Puerto Plata in the Dominican …
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International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
On the morning of 21 March 1960, several thousand people gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville, a township in what was then the …
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International Day for the Abolition of Slavery
On 2 December 1949, in resolution 317, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of …
History
International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in
In the first months of 1991, as Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait, they set fire to more than 600 oil wells. The fires burned for the better part of …
History
International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action
In January 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, walked in a flak jacket and visor down a cleared lane through a minefield outside Huambo, in Angola, with …
History
International Day for Disaster Reduction
On 22 December 1989 the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 44/236 and, almost as a footnote to a larger plan, designated the second …
History
International Day for Biological Diversity
On 22 May 1992, in a conference room in Nairobi, delegates finalised the text of a treaty that ran to forty-two articles and tried to do something no …
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International Day against Nuclear Tests
On 28 February 1989, the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov broke from the script of a live televised poetry reading and began, instead, to speak about the …
History
International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia
On 17 May 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases, the global reference doctors …
History
International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking
In June 1839, on the muddy flats near Humen in Guangdong, an Imperial Commissioner of Qing China named Lin Zexu ordered the destruction of roughly …
History
Indonesian Independence Day
At ten o’clock on the morning of 17 August 1945, Sukarno stood on the porch of his own house at Jalan Pegangsaan Timur No. 56 in Jakarta and …
History
Indian Independence Day
At the stroke of the midnight hour on 14 August 1947, as the date turned to the 15th, Jawaharlal Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi …
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India Republic Day
On 24 January 1950, in the Constitution Hall in New Delhi, the 308 members of the Constituent Assembly filed up to sign two handwritten copies of a …
History
Guy Fawkes Night
In the small hours of 5 November 1605, a man giving his name as John Johnson was found in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, standing beside …
History
Finnish Independence Day
On the afternoon of 6 December 1917, in a Helsinki where the sun had already set hours earlier, the Parliament of Finland adopted a short declaration …
History
European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism
On 23 August 1986, around ten thousand people gathered in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, wore black ribbons on their coats, and raised the flags …
History
Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare
In the early evening of 22 April 1915, near the Belgian town of Ypres, French and Canadian soldiers watched a low greenish-yellow fog roll towards …
History
D-Day
At 04:00 on 5 June 1944, in a Nissen hut at Southwick House near Portsmouth, a meteorologist named Group Captain James Stagg gave Dwight D. Eisenhower …
History
Brazilian Independence Day
On the afternoon of 7 September 1822, riding beside a small stream called the Ipiranga on the outskirts of São Paulo, a 23-year-old prince read a …
History
Bastille Day
On 14 July 1789, a Paris crowd attacked a medieval fortress to lay hands on gunpowder, and held just seven prisoners by the time they got inside: four …
History
Bangladesh Independence Day
In the small hours of 26 March 1971, as the Pakistani army’s tanks moved through the streets of Dhaka and the killing of Operation Searchlight …
History
Armistice Day
At 5:10 on the morning of 11 November 1918, in a railway carriage parked on a siding in the Forest of Compiègne, a small group of exhausted men put …
History
ANZAC Day
Before dawn on 25 April 1915, boats carrying Australian and New Zealand soldiers grounded on a narrow beach below steep cliffs on the Gallipoli …
History
Ada Lovelace Day
In 2009, a British technologist named Suw Charman-Anderson grew tired of a recurring pattern: at the technology conferences she attended, the speakers …