ON THIS DAY

1888 Mary Ann Nichols is murdered. She is the first of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

1901 The white prison population of British concentration camps for August is given as 105 347, with 1 878 fatalities. Black inmates number 53 154, with 575 deaths recorded. 1902 Eighteen ships are wrecked in a storm in Algoa Bay; 58 lives are lost.

1902 The split skirt is introduced to society by an enterprising horse rider, Emily Stevens Ladenburg. While the split skirt had been worn by Annie Oakley and other celebrated women of the West, Ladenburg introduced it to wealthy circles in the eastern US and helped end the status quo of side-saddle riding for women. The side-saddle style, de rigueur for Victorian women, was rooted in a male obsession with women’s virginity and reinforced myths about women’s frailty and helplessness, leading Rita Mae Brown to say: “If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle.” In the 1900s, riding astride became a symbol of women’s liberation, and several suffragist parades/demonstrations were led by women on horseback, riding astride.

1939 Nazi Germany mounts a false flag attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, creating an excuse to attack Poland.

1939 The Japanese invasion army is thrown out of Mongolia by the Soviets in the decisive battle of the undeclared Soviet-japanese Border War, at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. 1942 The British army under General Bernard Montgomery defeats Field-marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at Alam al-halfa.

1968 The West Indies’ Garfield Sobers is the first cricketer to hit six sixes in an over.

1997 Britain’s much-beloved Diana, the princess of Wales, her lover Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul die in a car crash in a road tunnel in Paris, France.

2005 A bridge stampede over the Tigris in Baghdad leaves 1 199 people dead.

2006 Stolen two years earlier, Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream is recovered in a raid by Norwegian police.

2016 Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff is impeached and removed from office. | THE HISTORIAN