Status Updates From On This Day: The History of...

SEPTEMBER 2

1865 Boundary disputes end between the British settlers and the Maori Kingitanga in New Zealand.

SEPTEMBER 1

Fischer reels in Title

1972 Bobby Fischer became the first American world chess champion today. The temperamental 29-year-old boy wonder from Brooklyn finally triumphed over defending champion Boris Spassky of the USSR after a marathon two-month struggle, which also established Fischer as one of the work's unreasonable people. Fischer, who was US champion at 14 and an international grandmaster at ...

AUGUST 31

Spleen machine

1867 The French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire died in his mother's arms today in Paris. He was 46. Born into a well-off middle-class family, Baudelaire determined from an early age to live as an artist and embraced eccentricity, affectation and immorality. By his early twenties he was an opium addict and had acquired the venereal disease that owl eventually kill him. He won plaudits

AUGUST 30

1860 The first trains in Britain begin running.

AUGUST 29

Beatle hit Klan-land

1966 The Beatles ended their controversial tour of the States with a concert for thousands of screaming fans in San Francisco's Candlestick Park tonight. John Lennon's widely reported comment about the group being more popular that Jesus Christ reached the States shortly before the group touched down to begin the tour. Lennon's apology at their first press conference in Chicago ...

AUGUST 28

1862 Garibaldi's army land at Calabria in their march to Rome.

Fab Four's guiding light

1967 Brian Epstein, the man who made the Beatles, died of a drugs overdose today at his elegant home in London's Belgravia. He was 33. Epstein "discovered" the Beatles in Liverpool's Cavern Club in the autumn of 1961 and determined to make them into stars. He succeeded beyond his, and their, wildest dreams. Lately Epstein had been chronically depressed and afflicted by insomnia by ...

AUGUST 26

1789 The French Assembly adopts the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

AUGUST 25

WEBB CRACKS THE CHANNEL CHALLENGE

1875 Englishman Matthew Webb made history today by becoming the first person to swim the English Channel. The 2S-year-old master mariner from Srhopshire set off from Admiralt pier, Dover, yesterday. Swimming breaststroke, he covered the 21-mile (34 km) stretch to Calais in 21 hours 45 minutes, emerging on the French side tired but triumphant, This feat would be ...

AUGUST 24

1906 Kidney transplants are carried out on dogs at a medical conference in Toronto, Canada.

AUGUST 23

Love at first flight

1988 British Airways showed off its first husband and wife team of pilot recruits today. The couple, Anna and Danish-born Marten Riis, begin the intensive pilots' course with BA tomorrow. After training, then will be assigned to separate aircraft as co-pilots. The couple met on a commercial pilot's course at Perth in Scotland and married precisely tow years and five days later.

AUGUST 22

1882 Belgium signs a commercial treaty with. Britain,

AUGUST 21

Now we rein a period which I can characterize as a period of cold peace.

Trygve Lie, first United Nations Secretary general, 1940.

AUGUST 20

1913 Adolphe Pégond bales out of an airplane at 700 ft (213 m) and parachutes safely to the ground, becoming the first person to parachute from a plane.

AUGUST 19

PASCAL DIES

1662 Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher, died in Paris today, aged 39. Pascal pursued his intellectual enquiries with an all-consuming passion In November 1654 he experienced the "night of fire" that changed his life, and he temporarily abandoned the world of science — and inventions such as a calculating device, the syringe and the hydraulic press ...

AUGUST 18

1939 The film The Wizard of Ox is released New York.

AUGUST 17

Pakistan president blown out of the skies

1988 General Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's iron-fisted ruler for the past 11 years, died today when the camouflaged C-130 Hercules plane in which he was travelling crashed shortly after take-off. Zia, 64, was on his way back to Islamabad after watching a demonstration of the capabilities of the US M1A1 Abrams tank at an army testing range near the airport of Bahawalpur..

AUGUST 16

1949 Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind, dies after being hit by a car two days previously.

AUGUST 15

1534 Former Spanish knight Ignatius Loyola today led his small band of followers to Montmartre in Paris, whee they bound themselves by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Loyola has already appeared before the religious authorities in Spain and France to explain his unusual lifestyle. Between 1522 and d his arrival in the French capital in 1528, he routinely included begging, scourging himself and ...

August 14

1947 Pakistan becomes independent from India to satisfy the Muslim League's demand for a separate state for the Muslim minority.

AUGUST 13

Churchill's glory days

1704 The allied armies of the Grand Coalition won a resounding victory today over a numerically superior Franco-Bavarian force at Blenheim, north of the Danube. Led by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and his "twin-captain", Eugene, Prince of Savoy, the allied army of 52,000 men mounted a surprise attack on the 56,000-strong enemy force. By the end of the afternoon the French...

AUGUST 12

1863 The last of the quaggas dies in Amsterdam zoo.

AUGUST 11

1519 Johann Tetzel has died in Leipzig priory aged 54. Tetzel's forgiveness-for-cash career began when the Archbishop of Mainz hit on it as a way of raising money for the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome. Tetzel saw nothing wrong in padding indulgences, defending the practice in 50 theses.

AUGUST 11

1846 The Smithsonian institution for scientific research is established in Washington with a bequest from English scientist James Smithson.

AUGUST 9

Real-life drama

1967 The bizarre life of playwright Joe Orton, 34, came to a bizarre end today. In a tiny Islington bedsit, police found Orton with his skull smashed in and his flatmate Kenneth Halliwell, 40, dead from an overdose. A note, written by Halliwell, was discovered nearby; it read, "If you read his diary all will be explained". Orton shot to fame in 1964 with the success of his first play,...

AUGUST 8

1588 The Spanish Armada is finally defeated by the British.

AUGUST 7

No more fine messes

1957 Oliver Hardy, the fat one in the Laurel and Hardy comic-duo, died of a stroke today, aged 65. Born in Harlem, Georgia, Ollie (real name Norvell) stumbled into films by chance after a s series of career failures, including law and medicine. He made little headway in Hollywood until in 1927 producer Hal Roach teamed him with British-born ex-Vaudeville trooper Stan Laurel (Arthur...

AUGUST 6

Holy Roman Emperor Francis II abdicates.

AUGUST 5

Everybody has a right to pronounce foreign names as he chooses.

Winston Churchill, 1951.

AUGUST 4

1940 The Italians invade the country of British Somaliland in East Africa.