Episodes

Rerun. When two month-old Azaria Chamberlain was taken from her tent by a dingo on the night of August 17th, 1980, the majority of the Australian public believed that her mother, Lindy Chamerlain, had done the deed herself. Prosecuting authorities charged her with murder. She was imprisoned, but in 2012, a coroner found Azaria’s death […]

Angry protestors gathered outside The White House on 16th August, 1841, burning an effigy of President John Tyler, the first Vice-President to assume the Presidency (following the death of William Henry Harrison, just 31 days into his term). The mob, largely consisting of Tyler’s fellow Whigs, opposed his veto of a national banking bill.  Although

Immortalised by Shakespeare, Scottish king Macbeth was killed in battle near Lumphanan, Aberdeenshire on 15th August 1057; a demise that brought significant changes to Scotland’s monarchy. But the real Macbeth, contrary to his portrayal in the play, ruled for 17 relatively peaceful years and displayed generosity toward the church. That said, his relationship with the

A decades-long manhunt closed in on international terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, on 14th August, 1994 – when he was sedated and kidnapped by French intelligence agents in Khartoum, Sudan, following a tip-off by the CIA. Affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Organization for Armed Arab Struggle,

The Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, opened on 11th August, 1992, with more than 10,000 employees, 330 stores, and a Camp Snoopy theme park. With a gross area of 4.8 million square feet, the mall remains the largest in the United States; its roughly 40 million annual visitors equal to around eight times the

Rerun. Whilst visiting traumatised U.S. soldiers in an evacuation hospital on 10th August, 1943, General George S. Patton encountered a man he believed to be a coward. So he slapped him in the face with his gloves, and waved a pistol in his face. On Eisenhower’s insistence, Patton apologised to the soldier, but never exhibited

Quilon, in present-day Kerala, became India’s first diocese on 9th August, 1329. In response to Marco Polo’s accounts about an extant Christian community there, Pope John XXII had dispatched missionary Jordan Catalani to oversee the region.  According to local legend, St. Thomas the apostle reached India around A.D. 50, where he established several churches. The

The dollar emerged as the official currency of the United States at a meeting of the Continental Congress on 8th August, 1786. During the American Revolution, various international coins had remained in circulation – alongside commodities like tobacco and cod. The transition to paper money faced challenges due to counterfeiting concerns, which persisted until the

The Kon-Tiki expedition, led by Norwegian explorer and ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl, reached Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelag near Tahiti, on 7th August, 1947. The 45-foot-long balsa wood raft, with a five-man crew, had completed a 4,300-mile, 101-day journey from Peru.  Heyerdahl wanted to prove his (now discredited) theory that prehistoric South Americans could have colonized

The public stocks in St Clement’s Dane’s parish (now Portugal Street in London’s Strand) were finally dismantled on 4th August, 2023. They had originally been mandated in 1351, to subjugate labourers demanding higher wages.  Not to be confused for pillories (which restrain both head and hands), stocks (which restrain only the feet) were used for