r/ThisDayInHistory

1 August 1944. Believing liberation was only days away, Warsaw rose against the Nazis.

11 August 1996. Tassos Isaac, a Greek Cypriot refugee, was beaten to death by Turkish nationalist Grey Wolves during a 1996 demonstration in the UN buffer zone. He became trapped in barbed wire and was attacked with clubs and stones while UN peacekeepers and Turkish Cypriot police watched.

21 August 1909. Ethel Caterham, the world's oldest living person, was born in England. She has lived through the Russian Revolution, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the nuclear age, the Space Age and the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, she turns 117.

3 August 1936. Jesse Owens won the 100m Olympic gold in Berlin. He later said it wasn't Hitler who snubbed him - it was his own president.

4 August 1961. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, the only US president born in the 1960s.

27 August 1979. An IRA bomb killed Lord Mountbatten and his 14-year-old grandson aboard a fishing boat. Hours later, the IRA killed 18 British soldiers in Northern Ireland.

14 August 1996, 26-year-old Greek Cypriot Solomos Solomou was shot and killed by Turkish forces in the UN buffer zone at Deryneia while attempting to climb a flagpole and remove a Turkish flag. Just three days earlier, his cousin Tassos Isaac had been beaten to death by Turkish nationalists.

On this day in 1814. British troops captured Washington DC then set the Presidential Mansion (now the White House) on fire. It was part of the War of 1812 and is the only time since the US Revolutionary War a foreign power captured and occupied the capital of the United States.

On August 11th 1954 Rosa Parks boarded a bus on her way to work

August 31 1922. After the Turkish victory of the Great Offensive, the retreating Greek Army began pursuing the "Scorched-Earth" (destroy everything) policy, burning and destroying everything in their path as they fled.