📜 This Day in History
August 21
1689Jacobite clans clashed with a regiment of Covenanters in the streets of Dunkeld, Scotland.- 1789The national colours of Italy first appeared on a tricolour cockade in Genoa.
- 1942World War II: The Imperial Japanese Army lost the Battle of the Tenaru, the first of its three major land offensives during the Guadalcanal campaign.
- 1945American physicist Harry Daghlian accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a plutonium bomb core, exposing himself to neutron radiation and later becoming the first Manhattan Project fatality due to a criticality accident.
- 1986A limnic eruption of Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a cloud of carbon dioxide, suffocating 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock.
- 2015Passengers on a Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris confronted and subdued an attacker who attempted a mass shooting.
