What Happened on August 20th in History
30 historical events on this date
Soviet Consul General in New York, Jacob M. Lomakin is expelled by the United States, due to the Kasenkina Case.
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States. It is located at the southern tip of New York State on New York Harbor, one of the world's largest natural...
Hungary adopts the Hungarian Constitution of 1949 and becomes a People's Republic.
Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia...
Battle of Philippeville: In Morocco, a force of Berbers from the Atlas Mountains region of Algeria raid two rural settlements and kill 77 French nationals.
The Battle of Philippeville, also known as the Philippeville massacre or the August Offensive, was a series of raids launched on 20 August 1955 on various cities and towns of the Constantine region...
Senegal breaks from the Mali Federation, declaring its independence.
Senegal, officially the Republic of Senegal, is the westernmost country in West Africa, situated along the Atlantic Ocean coast. It borders Mauritania to the north, Mali to the east, Guinea to the...
The NS Savannah, the world's first nuclear-powered civilian ship, embarks on its maiden voyage.
NS Savannah was the first nuclear-powered merchant ship, launched on July 21, 1959, two years after the Soviet ice-breaker Lenin, the first nuclear-powered civilian vessel. A demonstration project...
Cold War: Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring. East German participation is limited to a few specialists due to memories of the recent war. Only Albania and Romania refuse to participate.
The Cold War was a period of international geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist...
Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.
The Viking program consisted of a pair of identical American space probes, Viking 1 and Viking 2 both launched in 1975, and landed on Mars in 1976. The mission effort began in 1968 and was managed...
ÄSA Flight 540 crashes on approach to Damascus International Airport in Damascus, Syria, killing 126 people.
ÄSA Flight 540 was a regularly scheduled international flight from Prague, Czechoslovakia to Tehran, Iran via Damascus, Syria and Baghdad, Iraq. On 20 August 1975, the flight, operated by an...
Voyager program: NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft.
The Voyager program is an American scientific program that employs two interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable planetary alignment...
In Edmond, Oklahoma, U.S. Postal employee Patrick Sherrill shoots and kills 14 of his co-workers and then commits suicide.
Edmond is a city in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, United States. It is a part of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, in Central Oklahoma. Its population was 94,428 at the 2020 United States census, a...
"Black Saturday" of the Yellowstone fire in Yellowstone National Park
The Yellowstone fires of 1988 collectively formed the largest wildfire in the recorded history of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. Starting as many smaller individual fires, the...
IranāIraq War: A ceasefire is agreed after almost eight years of war.
The IranāIraq War began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980. After eight years of conflict, both countries accepted a ceasefire deal brokered by the United Nations, which became...
The Troubles: Eight British soldiers are killed and 28 wounded when their bus is hit by an IRA roadside bomb in Ballygawley, County Tyrone.
The Troubles were an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted for about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it began...
The pleasure boat Marchioness sinks on the River Thames following a collision. Fifty-one people are killed.
The Marchioness disaster was a collision between two vessels on the River Thames in London in the early hours of 20 August 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 51 people. The pleasure boat...
Dissolution of the Soviet Union, August Coup: More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union's parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Soviet Union was formally dissolved and ceased to exist as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the...
Estonia, occupied by and incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, issues a decision on the re-establishment of independence on the basis of legal continuity of its pre-occupation statehood.
Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the Baltic...
In India, Meitei language (officially known as Manipuri language) was included in the scheduled languages' list and made one of the official languages of the Indian Government.
Meitei, also known as Manipuri, is a Tibeto-Burman language of northeast India. It is the official language and the lingua franca of Manipur and an additional official language in four districts of...
The Firozabad rail disaster kills 358 people in Firozabad, India.
The Firozabad rail collision occurred on 20 August 1995 near Firozabad on the DelhiāKanpur section of India's Northern Railway, at 02:55 when a passenger train collided with a train that had stopped...
Souhane massacre in Algeria; over 60 people are killed and 15 kidnapped.
The largest of the Souhane massacres occurred in the small mountain town of Souhane on 20ā21 August 1997. 64 people were killed, and 15 women were kidnapped; the resulting terror triggered a mass...
The Supreme Court of Canada rules that Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the federal government's approval.
The Supreme Court of Canada is the highest court in the judicial system of Canada. It comprises nine justices, whose decisions are the ultimate application of Canadian law, and grants permission to...
U.S. embassy bombings: The United States launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The 1998 United States embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998. More than 220 people were killed in two nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East...
A group of Iraqis opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein take over the Iraqi embassy in Berlin, Germany for five hours before releasing their hostages and surrendering.
Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 until his overthrow in 2003 during the United States-led invasion of Iraq. He previously...
Sri Lankan Civil War: Sri Lankan Tamil politician and former MP S. Sivamaharajah is shot dead at his home in Tellippalai.
The Sri Lankan civil war was fought in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009. Beginning on 23 July 1983, it was an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam led by...
China Airlines Flight 120 catches fire and explodes after landing at Naha Airport in Okinawa, Japan.
China Airlines Flight 120 was a regularly scheduled international flight from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport in Taoyuan County, Taiwan to Naha Airport in Okinawa, Japan. On 20 August 2007, the...
Spanair Flight 5022, from Madrid, Spain to Gran Canaria, skids off the runway and crashes at Barajas Airport. Of the 172 people on board, 146 die immediately, and eight more later die of injuries sustained in the crash.
Spanair Flight 5022 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from BarcelonaāEl Prat Airport to Gran Canaria Airport, Spain, with a stopover in MadridāBarajas Airport that crashed just after...
First Air Flight 6560 crashes 1 mile from the Resolute Bay runway, killing 12 of the 15 aboard.
First Air Flight 6560 was a domestic charter flight that crashed on landing at Resolute, Nunavut, Canada, on 20 August 2011. Of the fifteen people on board, twelve were killed and the remaining...
A prison riot in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, kills at least 20 people.
On 20 August 2012, armed prisoners in the Yare I prison complex, an overcrowded prison in Miranda state near Caracas, Venezuela, rioted. A shootout between two groups resulted in the deaths of 25...
Seventy-two people are killed in Japan's Hiroshima Prefecture by a series of landslides caused by a month's worth of rain that fell in one day.
Hiroshima Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūgoku region of Honshu. Hiroshima Prefecture has a population of 2,811,410 and has a geographic area of 8,479 km2. Hiroshima...
Fifty-four people are killed when a suicide bomber detonates himself at a Kurdish wedding party in Gaziantep, Turkey.
On 20 August 2016, a suicide bomber targeted a Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep, Turkey. 57 people were killed and 66 injured in the attack, 14 critically.
Joe Biden gives his acceptance speech virtually for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is an American former politician who was the 46th president of the United States from 2021 to 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented Delaware in the United...