August 14 in History

Forces from eight nations, including Japan, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, stormed Beijing on August 14, 1900, ending the 55-day siege of the Legation Quarter and crushing the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers, a Chinese peasant movement called the "Righteous and Harmonious Fists," had been attacking foreigners and Chinese Christians with the tacit support of Empress Dowager Cixi. The foreign occupiers looted the imperial palaces and extracted the Boxer Protocol of 1901, which imposed a staggering indemnity of 450 million taels of silver (roughly $10 billion today) payable over 39 years. The humiliation accelerated the collapse of the Qing dynasty, which fell in 1912.

Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935, creating the first federal safety net for elderly Americans. Before Social Security, roughly half of all Americans over 65 lived in poverty, dependent on children or charity. The Act established a payroll tax that funded monthly retirement benefits starting at age 65. The first monthly check went to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, in January 1940: $22.54. She had paid a total of $24.75 in taxes. She lived to 100 and collected $22,889. Critics called it socialism; supporters called it civilization. The program now provides benefits to over 70 million Americans and is the largest single expenditure of the federal government.

Japan's formal surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, ended the deadliest conflict in human history. But August 14 was when Emperor Hirohito broadcast his surrender announcement, the first time Japanese citizens had ever heard his voice. He spoke in formal court Japanese that many listeners couldn't understand, using the euphemism "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage." Some military officers attempted a coup to prevent the broadcast, raiding the Imperial Palace the night before to find and destroy the recording. They failed. Celebrations erupted across Allied nations: two million people flooded into Times Square in New York.

Pakistan came into existence at midnight on August 14, 1947, one day before India's independence, carved out of British India's Muslim-majority regions in a partition that created the largest mass migration in human history. Between 10 and 20 million people crossed the new borders in both directions. Hindu and Sikh families fled west Pakistan; Muslim families fled east. Communal violence killed an estimated one to two million people. Trains arrived at stations filled with corpses. The new nation consisted of two geographically separated wings, West and East Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. East Pakistan broke away in 1971 to become Bangladesh. The partition's wounds define South Asian geopolitics to this day.

King Joao I of Portugal and his brilliant general Nuno Alvares Pereira defeated a much larger Castilian army at Aljubarrota on August 14, 1385, using terrain and defensive tactics that neutralized Castilian cavalry superiority. The Portuguese positioned their forces on a narrow hillside between two streams, forcing the enemy to attack uphill on a constricted front where their numbers counted for nothing. The battle lasted less than an hour. Castilian King John I fled the field, and his forces suffered catastrophic losses. The victory permanently secured Portuguese independence from Castile and cemented the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, formalized by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, the oldest diplomatic alliance still in force today.

Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, ambushed an English relief column of 4,000 soldiers under Sir Henry Bagenal at the Yellow Ford on the Blackwater River on August 14, 1598. Bagenal himself was killed by a musket ball through his visor. Irish musketeers and pikemen, trained in modern European tactics, shattered the English formation, killing or wounding roughly half the column and capturing the entire baggage train. The victory was the worst English military defeat in Ireland to that point and triggered a wave of rebellion across the island. Queen Elizabeth was forced to send her largest-ever army to Ireland under the Earl of Essex, and eventually Robert Devereaux, to suppress the revolt that O'Neill's victory had ignited.