Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/August 20

This is a list of selected August 20 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← August 19	August 21 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  "Anonymous" seal of Simeon I
• 
  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• 
  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• 1812 Overture
• 
  Statue of St. Stephen of Hungary
• 
  NS Savannah
• 
  Voyager Spacecraft
• 
  Yellowstone fires
• 
  Mercedes-Benz O305 on the O-Bahn
• 
  Pluto

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Ghost Festival (Chinese calendar, 2013);	refimprove
1905 – Sun Yat-sen (pictured), Song Jiaoren, and others founded the Tongmenghui, a secret society dedicated to overthrowing the Qing dynasty of China.	refimprove
1940 – In the midst of the Battle of Britain, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech thanking the Royal Air Force, declaring, "Never was so much owed by so many to so few."	refimprove section
1944 – World War II: The Gestapo transported 168 Allied airmen, who had been classified as spies and criminals so as not to warrant prisoner of war treatment, to Buchenwald concentration camp.	page numbers needed
1962 – NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered cargo-passenger ship, made her maiden voyage.	Overwhelmingly single sourced, several unsourced paragraphs
1971 – The Stanford prison experiment, one of the most infamous psychological studies, was ended after six days, when the simulation became too abusive.	Tagged primary sources
1977 – NASA's Voyager 2 lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, on a mission to explore the outer planets of the Solar System.	unreferenced section
1882 – The 1812 Overture by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky debuted in Moscow, conducted by Ippolit Al'tani.	citations needed
1993 – Oslo Accords	Moved to September 13
1998 – The Supreme Court of Canada delivered its decision in Reference Re Secession of Quebec, ruling that Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the federal government's approval.	refimprove
Eadberht of Northumbria |d|768|	date of death uncertain; might be 19th or 20th;[1]
Leona Helmsley |d|2007|	Mulitple cn tags

Eligible

• 636 – Rashidun forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid took control of Syria and Palestine in the Battle of the Yarmuk, marking the first great wave of Muslim conquests.
• 917 – Byzantine–Bulgarian wars: Bulgarian forces led by Tsar Simeon I drove the Byzantines out of Thrace with a decisive victory at the Battle of Achelous.
• 1710 – War of the Spanish Succession: A Spanish Bourbon army commanded by the Marquis de Bay was soundly defeated by a multinational army led by the Austrian commander Guido Starhemberg.
• 1794 – American troops defeated the Northwestern Confederacy, a Native American alliance, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the decisive battle of the Northwest Indian War.
• 1909 – Pluto was photographed for the first time at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, U.S., 21 years before it was officially discovered by Clyde Tombaugh.
• 1950 – Korean War: United Nations forces repelled an attempt by North Korea to capture the city of Taegu.
• 1988 – The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army bombed a bus carrying British Army soldiers in Northern Ireland, killing eight of them and wounding another twenty-eight.
• 1988 – Fires in the United States' Yellowstone National Park ravaged more than 150,000 acres (610 km²), the single-worst day of the conflagration.
• 1989 – The final stage of the O-Bahn Busway in Adelaide, South Australia, was completed, at the time the world's longest and fastest guided busway with buses travelling a total of 12 km (7.5 mi) at maximum speeds of up to 100 km/h (62 mph).
• 1989 – After colliding with the dredger Bowbelle on the River Thames in London, the pleasure boatMarchioness sank in just thirty seconds, killing 51 people.
• Born/died: | Henry Every |b|1659| George Tucker |b|1775| James Prinsep |b|1799| Bolesław Prus |b|1847 | Rudolf Bultmann |b|1884|H. P. Lovecraft |b|1890| Terry Sanford |b|1917| Ron Paul |b|1935|Agnes Giberne |d|1939| Amy Adams |b|1974| Jack King |b|1985| Mika Yamamoto |d|2012| B. K. S. Iyengar |d|2014| Kelsey Weems |d|2019

Notes

• 1998 United States embassy bombings appears on August 7, so Operation Infinite Reach should not appear in the same year
• The Hardest Day appears on August 18, so Churchill's speech should not appear in the same year
• Omagh bombing appears on August 19, so Ballygawley bus bombing should not appear in the same year

August 20

Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory

• 1707 – The first Siege of Pensacola came to an end with the British and Creek abandoning their attempt to capture Pensacola in Spanish Florida.
• 1910 – Hurricane-force winds combined hundreds of small fires in the U.S. states of Washington and Idaho into the Devil's Broom fire, which burned about 4,700 square miles (12,100 km²), the largest fire in recorded U.S. history.
• 1920 – The American Professional Football Association, a predecessor of the National Football League, was founded.
• 1998 – The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory (pictured) in Sudan was destroyed by a missile attack launched by the United States in retaliation for the August 7 U.S. embassy bombings.
• 2008 – Spanair Flight 5022 crashed just after take-off from Madrid's Barajas Airport, killing 154 people.

• Jeremi Wiśniowiecki (d. 1651)
• Phil Lynott (b. 1949)
• Andrew Garfield (b. 1983)
• Narendra Dabholkar (d. 2013)

More anniversaries:

• August 19
• August 20
• August 21