ON THIS DAY SEPTEMBER 2
44BC Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion. 31BC In the Battle of Actium, off the western coast of Greece, the forces of Octavian defeat troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The battle effectively marks the end of the Roman republic.
1666 The Great Fire of London begins at 2am in Pudding Lane; 80% of London is destroyed. 1806 A landslide destroys the town of Goldau, Switzerland, killing 457 people.
1848 Sir Harry Smith proclaims the territory between the Orange and Vaal rivers as British territory, discounting protests by Voortrekker leader Andries Pretorius.
1870 Prussian forces take Napoleon III of France and 100 000 of his soldiers prisoner in the Battle of Sedan.
1898 Lord Kitchener’s force decisively defeats the Dervishes at the Battle of Omdurman, Sudan, taking Khartoum.
1901 US vice-president Theodore Roosevelt, first utters the phrase, “Speak softly and carry a big stick” at the Minnesota State Fair.
1909 Britain’s King Edward VII signs the South Africa Act, creating the Union of South Africa from the colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony, and Transvaal. 1944 Holocaust diarist Anne Frank is sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1945 V-J Day, formal surrender of Japan aboard the “Mighty Mo”, the battleship USS Missouri, marks the end of World War II.
1987 In Moscow, the trial begins for Mathias Rust, 19, who flew his Cessna airplane undetected into Red Square.
1998 The UN’S International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda finds Jean-paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide.
2001 Chris Barnard, the medical pioneer who performed the first heart transplant, dies of an acute asthma attack in his hotel room in Paphos, Cyprus, where he was holidaying. 2015 Earth’s trees number 3 trillion according to a Yale University study.
2019 Violence and looting directed at foreigners in Johannesburg results in five deaths and dozens arrested by the police.
| THE HISTORIAN