Today in Depressing History

Something terrible has happened.

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August 27, 2013: Today in Depressing History blog closes down

On August 27, 2013, the Tumblr blog "Today in Depressing History" was ended by its author, midway through its first year. The blog, which catalogued tragedies and injustices committed on specific dates in history, was launched on January 1 of that year; it had no set end date, but plans were made for three years of entries. Originally updating the site daily at 1:00 AM Pacific Time, the author found the schedule difficult to maintain and the process of writing entries far more laborious than expected. Entries were occasionally posted hours past the intended time; as the months dragged on, these tardy entries grew more frequent, and by its last week the blog was updating behind schedule on a daily basis. Finally, on August 27, the author's personal schedule prevented the compilation of the intended article (on the Sauk leader Black Hawk's surrender to the U.S. government in 1832), and decided to end the blog prematurely. Today in Depressing History was preceded in death by its own parody account, Tomorrow in Depressing History (which lasted only six days), and is survived by the blog Party Goatz, which posts daily photos and videos of wild and domestic goats in amusing situations.

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August 26, 1999: Russia launches Second Chechen War

On August 26, 1999, the Russian Armed Forces launched bombing raids against Chechnya, beginning the Second Chechen War. The region of Chechnya had been under Russian control since the nineteenth century. During the dissolution of the Soviet union in 1990 and 1991, fifteen former Soviet republics became independent countries, but other formerly autonomous regions, including Chechnya, remained subjects in the newly formed Russian Federation. A separatist movement fought against Russia in the First Chechen War, which lasted from 1994 to 1996 and resulted in a Chechen victory. The separatist government was unable to maintain control over the region, however, and in August of 1999 a rival militia entered Dagestan in an attempt to liberate that republic from Russian rule. In response, the Russian Air Force began a series of air raids against Chechnya, destroying targets in Serzhen-Yurt and later bombing the Chechen capital Grozny. The Russians killed hundreds of civilians in the span of about a month, destroyed an oil refinery and doens of bridges, and laid mines along hundreds of miles of roads. In October, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sent in ground troops as well. The military attacked civilian targets, such as a bus and a marketplace, and committed brutal atrocities against the unarmed populace. The war ended in May of 2000 with a Russian victory and the re-establishment of Russian rule, though guerilla warfare continued for nearly a decade. Some 14,000 Chechen soldiers and untold thousands of civilians were killed during the war.

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August 25, 1950: U.S. President Harry Truman seizes railroads to break a strike

On August 25, 1950, United States President Harry S. Truman seized control of the nation's railroads to break an impending strike. The country's labor organizations had agreed not to strike for the duration of World War II for fear of hurting the war effort; when the war ended, the labor movement emerged with renewed vigor. A wave of strikes swept across the country, with workers demanding better pay and working conditions. Eight hundred thousand steel workers went on strike in 1946, followed by strikes in the coal and rail industries that same year; Truman responded by proposing (ultimately unsuccessful) legislation that would draft striking workers into the military. In 1950, railroad workers, represented mainly by the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and the Order of Railway Conductors, were again involved in a dispute and were poised to strike. Truman assembled an emergency negotiating board to reach a settlement, but his conditions were unacceptable and the unions rejected them. The workers continued to prepare for a strike, and on August 25 Truman signed an executive order directing the Army to seize control of the railroads. The war effort was again cited as a concern, this time referring to the Korean War, which had begun a few months earlier. The strike went on anyway, but with the Army ensuring that work proceeded regardless, the strike was robbed of its teeth. In May of 1952, after nearly two years on strike, the workers acquiesced to Truman's conditions and returned to work in defeat.

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August 24, 79: Mount Vesuvius erupts, killing 16,000 in Pompeii and environs

On August 24, 79, Mount Vesuvius, a highly active volcano on the Italian peninsula, erupted, completely destroying Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing 16,000 people. Pompeii was still recovering from a serious earthquake that had struck the region several years before, but no serious worry was given to the series of small earthquakes that began on August 20. After four days of tremors, Vesuvius suddenly burst forth with a massive column of ash, blanketing the nearby area. Several hours later, while rescue and cleanup efforts were still going on, the volcano began spewing superheated gas and rock, which rapidly advanced to surrounding towns, most notably Pompeii and Herculaneum. Many people were killed by the extreme heat; those who survived were burned and suffocated by the pyroclastic flow that followed, crushed under collapsing buildings, or struck by flying rock. Some sixteen thousand people were killed, many of whose bodies were preserved by the ash and rock flows which buried the towns. Over a thousand such bodies have been discovered by archaeologists, many in visible agony.

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August 23, 1927: Political prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti executed on false charges

On August 23, 1927, Italian-American anarchists Ferdinano Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston after having been wrongfully convicted in a highly politicized murder trial. The United States government and in particularly the FBI were cracking down on the anarchist movement among Italian immigrants, which had been implicated in a series of bombings and assassination attempts. In 1920, two shoe factory employees were shot and killed during a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Police began investigating the Italian community in Boston, and Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in a sting at an impound garage. During the trial, the prosecution introduced ambiguous physical evidence and contradictory witnesses, but the jury returned a guilty verdict. Sacco and Vanzetti received widespread support from the international community, and a defense committe filed five separate motions for a new trial, all of which were denied by the judge from the original case. Even after the confession of a different man—a member of a gang that had committed similar robberies against shoe factories, had a similar getaway car to the one Sacco and Vanzetti supposedly used, and whose ringleader bore a striking resemblance to Sacco—the judge refused to grant a retrial. The pair was electrocuted on August 23, 1927; their deaths led to continued protests, and the judge in the case lived the rest of his life under guard.

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August 22, 1910: Japan formally annexes Korea

On August 22, 1910, Japan formally annexed the nation of Korea with the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1910, officially beginning a thirty-five year occupation. Japan had made motions toward the conquest of Korea as early as 1876, and took increasing power through a series of treaties beginning that same date, but the 1910 treaty cemented the plan and made Korea a territory of the Japanese Empire. The United States had implied to Korea that they had American support, but Washington recognized Japan's claims and ignored Korean protest. Japan banned all Korean-owned newspapers, encouraged native Japanese to settle in Korea, and exploited differences between the two countries' legal systems to take control of massive swathes of Korean farmland. Japan even sought to control Korean subjects' personal names, first forbidding them from taking Japanese names and later requiring them to do so. During World War II, the Japanese government conscripted over five million Koreans into forced labor in Korea and Japan, subjecting them to dangerous conditions in mines and factories. Only at the end of the war was Korea finally independent again. But liberation would be brief; Korea was divided into two military zones by the Allied Forces in 1945, which became separate countries three years later. The nation remains divided to this day.

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August 21, 1986: Volcanic eruption of carbon dioxide kills 1,700 in Cameroon

On August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos, located in a volcanic crater in Cameroon's Northwest Region, suddenly spewed out a huge cloud of carbon dioxide in the middle of the night, suffocating over 1,700 people. Though the volcano is extinct, carbon dioxide gas continued to leak from gaseous springs beneath the lake, and was displaced due to a recent rainfall. The gass formed into a cloud over a hundred feet deep and spread throughout the surrounding countryside, killing nearly every human and animal within a fifteen-mile radius of the lake. Hundreds of survivors were treated in the main hospital of Yaoundé. A similar but smaller incident occurred two years earlier, killing 37. Scientists eventually determined the cause of the disaster and installed pipe to siphon water from lower levels of the lake and prevent carbon dioxide to escape all at once.

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August 20, 1910: Great Fire of 1910 strikes northwestern U.S., kills 87

On August 20, 1910, the Great Fire of 1910 began, destroying huge swathes of forest land across the northwestern United States and killing eighty-seven people over a two-day period. Though the cause of the fire has not been conclusively determined, several dangerous conditions were clear contributing factors: an extremely hot and dry summer led to dry plants and trees, and numerous smaller fires had broken out in the region in the preceding days and weeks. On August 20, sudden winds whipped up a number of small fires and combined them into a huge inferno. The fire quickly overwhelmed the limited firefighting capacities of the National Forest Service, which was only five years old and was totally unprepared for a blaze of this size. Firefighters were forced to flee from the expanding flames; some ducked into mineshafts, others into streams and rivers. Most of the eighty-seven people killed were firefighters. The blaze burned three million acres stretching from Washington into Montana, destroying eight million board feet of timber and sending smoke as far away as Colorado and, by one account, New York state. Only when the weather brought rain and snow were the fires finally extinguished. Several towns had been completely destroyed. The disaster led to major changes in Forest Service firefighting and prevention policy.

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August 19, 1953: CIA and MI5 overthrow the Prime Minister of Iran

On August 19, 1953, Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI5. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi became the Shah, the title of the country's reigning monarch, after his father's abdication in World War II. Mohammad Mosaddegh became Prime Minister in 1951 after having campaigned on a platform of reducing foreign influence in Iran. Central to this plan was the nationalization of Iran's oil production; all of the country's oil was produced by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation that sent the vast majority of its profits back to the United Kingdom, provided poor working conditions and low pay to its Iranian workers, and kept them in a shanty town. At the same time Mossadegh was elected, the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalize AIOC; his government also introduced unemployment compensation, mandatory benefits to sick factory workers, and a series of social programs funded by taxes on landlords. The nationalization of AIOC prompted Britain to pressure other countries not to buy Iranian oil. Britain began exploring the possibility of invading Iran, and continued trying to negotiate a deal with Mossadegh for a return of some of the profits. In 1953, the UK convinced the United States that the nationalization was a Soviet plot, and the two countries colluded in overthrowing Mosaddegh with the full support of the Shah. The coup—dubbed Operation Ajax by the US and Operation Boot by the UK—began with the Shah signing a pair of directives written by CIA administrators that dismissed Mosaddegh and replaced him with Fazlollah Zahedi, a general and cabinet member who had repeatedly clashed with Mosaddegh. MI5 and the CIA engineered violent protests that left 300 dead, culminating with Zahedi bombarding the prime minister's residence. The new government agreed to give the majority of Iran's oil to the United States and the United Kingdom, who in return provided massive funding to Iran's military and secret police.

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August 18, 1950: Belgian Communist leader Julien Lahaut is assassinated

On August 18, 1950, Julien Lahaut, leader of the Communist Party of Belgium and a member of the Belgian Parliament, was assassinated at his home in Seraing by right-wing monarchists. Lahaut joined the Communist Party after serving in World War I, and was elected to the Belgian Parliament in 1936. Lahaut and the Communist Party aided the resistance movement against the German occupation during World War II. After the end of the war, King Leopold III, who had capitulated to the Nazis, sought to return to the throne, a move which the country's left wing opposed. A national referendum placed him back in power, which was met with strikes across the country. In August of 1950, Leopold withdrew from power and installed his son Baudouin as king. When Baudouin was sworn in at the Parliament, Julien Lahaut shouted "Vive la République!" One week later, a pair of gunmen shot him dead outside his house; one of the killers was a known royalist. Despite the obvious political nature of the attack, the crime was investigated as a simple murder, and Communists were banned from public functions. The Belgian government has recently opened an investigation into the assassination to determine whether elements of the state were involved.

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August 17, 2009: Accident in Russian power station kills 75

On August 17, 2009, a turbine at the Sayano-Shushenskaya power station in Sayanogorsk, Russia broke apart, destroying much of the station and killing seventy-five workers. Sayano-Shushenskaya was the largest hydroelectric power station in Russia, and provided more than a fourth of the total power output of RusHydro, the largest power company in the country. Turbine 2 had a long history of defects and operational problems. In early 2009, it was repaired and modernized, with cracks and cavities welded over. However, the wheel was not correctly recalibrated after the repairs, and the turbine exhibited excessive vibration. Despite this obvious problem, it was put back into operation. On the morning of August 17, the turbine cover shot off with a bang and the rotor shot up into the air, destroying the roof of the facility. Water burst into the hall and quickly filled the room, drowning dozens of workers. Intake gates on the turbines had to be closed manually. When the room was finally drained, seventy-five people were found dead. The engine room had been destroyed, and several other turbines were damaged or decommissioned. The surrounding area suffered immediate blackouts lasting for up to two days. The region held an official day of mourning two days after the accident.

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August 16, 2012: South African police kill 34 unarmed striking miners

On August 16, 2012, South African police opened fire on a crowd of unarmed striking mine workers, killing 34 and injuring 78 in what would be known as the Marikana massacre. Workers at a Lonmin platinum mine in the Marikana area labored in dangerous conditions and lived in squalid housing, and on August 10 a group of rock drillers went on strike, demanding a pay raise. Three thousand workers walked off the job without permission from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which had a reputation of close ties with management and which opposed the strike. A day into the strike, NUM leaders shot and seriously injured two strikers, and another four were killed in the following three days. On August 16, a large crowd gathered at the mine in protest. Some carried sticks and knives. Police ordered them to put down their weapons and disperse. The crowd remained, and the police began forcing them into corners and dead-ends and firing water cannons and tear gas at them. In response to an alleged gunshot, the police began shooting at the protesters. In the space of three minutes, thirty-four protesters had been killed and seventy-eight wounded. Many of those shot were hunted down and shot in the back. Those arrested wer beaten while in police custody. Solidarity strikes and protests were held around the country after news of the massacre spread. A pay raise was eventually agreed upon, though much smaller than the workers had originally asked for.

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August 15, 2007: Eight-point earthquake strikes Peru, killing over 500

On August 15, 2007, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Peruvian coast, killing 519 people and destroying nearly 60,000 houses. The earthquake was the region's largest in over thirty years, and shook for a full three minutes. The city of Pisco was hit particularly hard; a cathedral collapsed on a congregation of Sunday evening parishioners, killing 148. A similar church collapse in Ica killed seventy. The quake was felt as far away as Lima, and fourteen hospitals in the country were completely destroyed. Remaining hospitals were overwhelmed with victims from the earthquake and its numerous aftershocks, and survivors had to be flown from Pisco to Lima to find medical facilities able to accomodate them. A sixteen-foot tsunami struck the coast, flooding highways and causing damage in Paracas. In total, 1,366 people were injured, and many are still living in tents to this day.

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August 14, 1969: British Army begins Operation Banner in Northern Ireland

On August 14, 1969, the British government launched Operation Banner, a decades-long campaign of occupation and repression of the Northern Irish liberation movement. Ireland had become a constituent country of the United Kingdom in 1801; when the Republic of Ireland achieved independence in the early twentieth century, the northern portion (the majority of whose population was Protestants loyal to Britain) remained part of the UK. Unionists in Northern Ireland—those who sought integration into the Republic of Ireland—were mainly Catholic and were subject to widespread discrimination. Sporadic skirmishes and demonstrations led to the breakout of unofficial war in the late 1960s between unionist civil rights groups and militants on the one hand and loyalist paramilitaries on the other. In response, the British began Operation Banner, the military occupation of Northern Ireland. The operation was presented as a peacekeeping program to prevent terrorism, but in actuality it aided the loyalist paramilitaries in suppressing the unionist liberation movement. The British Army imposed a massive curfew in 1970, arresting hundreds pf people and killing four civilians. The government began jailing people without trials, and launched police raids against Catholics, even those not suspected of membership in resistance groups. The most famous incident was 1972's Bloody Sunday, in which the Army killed fourteen unarmed protesters in Belfast. The operation was scaled down in the 1990s amid ceasefires and peace talks; by this point, the Army had killed over three hundred people, more than half of whom were civilians.

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August 13, 1521: Tenochtitlan falls to Hernán Cortés

On August 13, 1521, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell to the forces of Hernán Cortés, bringing the Aztec Empire under Spanish rule. Cortés had spent the past fifteen years as the Spanish governor of Cuba, and in 1519 he was assigned to lead an exploratory expedition of the Mexican coast. Cortés had poor relations with the Spanish government (his commission to lead the expedition was actually revoked before he set out on it), and was eager to conquer new territory in order to return to Castille's good graces. The Spanish massacre of nobles in the city of Cholula spread intimidation throughout the region, and in an apparent attempt to stave off such an attack, Cortés was invited to Tenochtitlan by Aztec ruler Moctezuma. Cortés arrived in November 1519 with hundreds of soldiers. Cortés took Moctezume hostage as a safety measure, and his troops occupied the city for months. During a festival in the spring of 1520, the Spanish brutally slaughtered thousands of Aztecs, including most of the priests, warriors, and nobility. The massacre was the final straw turning the populace against the Spanish; they began to fight back, and forced Cortés and his soldiers from Tenochtitlan. Moctezuma was killed during this fighting. After driving the Spanish out, Tenochtitlan was crippled with a sudden outbreak of smallpox; meanwhile, Cortés gathered hundreds of Spanish soldiers, including those from other armies, and thousands of allies from indigenous groups hostile to the Aztecs. The Spanish fought their way across the land from Tetzcoco to Chapultepec and finally back to Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs fought fiercely at Tenochtitlan, but their resources had been depleted by plague and war, and they were forced to surrender on August 13, 1521; the Spanish sacked the city after the surrender, killing even more. At least 100,000 Aztecs were killed during the fighting. Cortés banished the surviving Aztec from Tenochtitlan, razed the city, and rebuilt it in a Spanish style; turning it into what is now Mexico City.

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August 12, 1985: Plane crash in Japan kills 520

On August 12, 1985, Japan Airlines flight 123 crashed into Mount Takamagahara, killing 520 people in the worst single-plane disaster in history. The plane was carrying 15 crew members and 509 passengers, and was scheduled to fly from Tokyo to Osaka. Twelve minutes into the flight, the rear pressure bulkhead, which had been damaged and improperly repaired seven years earlier, tore open, causing an explosive decompression which in turn blew off the vertical stabilizer and severed the plane's hydraulic systems. The pilots sought an emergency landing, but were unable to control the plane. The airplane plunged, rose, and fell again. Thirty-two minutes into the flight, the plane crashed in a mountain range in a state forest. A Japanese military helicopter found the wreckage in the night, but was unable to land and reported no sign of survivors. Consequently, rescue teams did not approach the site until the following morning; they found four survivors and realized that many more had survived the initial crash only to die during the night. Altogether, 520 people died, making it the worst single-engine crash and the second-worst plane crash of any kind; only the Tenerife disaster of 1977 was worse.

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August 11, 1934: First prisoners arrive at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary

On August 11, 1934, the first civilian prisoners arrived at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Alcatraz Island, located in the San Francisco Bay, was originally the location of a Mexican lighthouse, and later became a military fortress and, after the Civil War, a military prison. The fortress was decommissioned in 1933 and given to the Department of Justice. It was designated as a prison for "troublemakers" from other federal prisons. The first group of inmates comprised 137 men from the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas; they were escorted to the prison by dozens of FBI agents and Federal Marshals. Inmates from other prisons arrived in the following days and weeks. The administration of the prison was strict, the guards brutal, and conditions deplorable. Inmates were forbidden from speaking out loud, cells were cramped, and the prison was racially segregated. Prisoners were often punished by being sent to "the Hole", a stripped down section of the prison with no natural light where prisoners were limited to one shower a week and were forced to sleep on the floor; one cell in this block had only a hole in the floor as a toilet, Financial troubles and a well-publicized escape attempt in 1962 led to the prison's closure the following year. The prisoners were transferred to the newly built prison in Marion, Illinois; Alcatraz Island was occupied by American Indian activists from 1969 to 1971, and is now a U.S. National Historic Landmark.