Polish government signs accord with Gdansk shipyard workers

An earthquake near Charleston, South Carolina, on August 31, 1886 leaves more than 100 people dead and hundreds of buildings destroyed. This was the largest recorded earthquake in the history of the southeastern United States. The earthquake was preceded by foreshocks felt in Summerville, South Carolina, on August 27 and 28 but, still, no one […]

Thomas Edison receives a patent for his movie camera, the Kinetograph. Edison had developed the camera and its viewer in the early 1890s and staged several demonstrations. The camera was based on photographic principles discovered by still-photograph pioneers Joseph Nicephone Niepce and Louis Daguerre of France. In 1877, inventor Edward Muybridge developed a primitive form […]

Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) receives its world premiere in Berlin on August 31, 1928. “I think I’ve written a good piece and that several numbers in it, at least musically, have the best prospects for becoming popular very quickly.” This was the assessment offered by the German composer Kurt Weill in a letter to […]

On August 31, 1955, William G. Cobb of the General Motors Corp. (GM) demonstrates his “Sunmobile,” the world’s first solar-powered automobile, at the General Motors Powerama auto show held in Chicago, Illinois. The vehicle was 15 inches long. Cobb’s Sunmobile introduced, however briefly, the field of photovoltaics—the process by which the sun’s rays are converted […]

Diana, Princess of Wales—affectionately known as "the People’s Princess"—dies in a car crash in Paris. She was 36. Her boyfriend, the Egyptian-born socialite Dodi Fayed, and the driver of the car, Henri Paul, died as well.

Igniting a heated debate within her nation and across the globe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declares “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”) on August 31, 2015, as she commits to accepting a mass influx of refugees amid Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Merkel’s controversial stance involved providing humanitarian support to approximately […]