ON THIS DAY AUGUST 17

1585 The first group of colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh lands in the New World to create Roanoke Colony on the island of the same name, off North Carolina.

1590 The governor of Roanoke Island colony, John White, returns from England to find no trace of the colonists he left 3 years earlier. 1661 The French Superintendent of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, throws one of the grandest and most opulent parties ever seen in France, appalling King Louis XIV and leading to Fouquet’s arrest for embezzlement.

1903 Joe Pulitzer gives $1 million to Columbia University. So begins the Pulitzer Prize.

1945 Korea is divided into North and South Korea along the 38th parallel.

1946 Prominent anti-apartheid activist John James Issel is born in Worcester. Aged 13 he organises and leads a protest against the ‘dop system’ and low wages. (Even after the end of white-minority rule, vineyards were known for inhuman labour conditions, including the notorious ‘dop system’ in which alcoholism was promoted among workers who were given wine in lieu of pay.)

1962 German bricklayer Peter Fechter, 18, is shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall from East Berlin to West Berlin. Hit in the hip, he falls back into the ‘death-strip’ and slowly bleeds to death, watched by hundreds of people on both side of the wall, who listen to his screams. A year before, on August 13 1961, the East German authorities abruptly closed the border and began construction of the Berlin Wall, effectively separating Fechter and his family from his sister in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall Foundation estimates that about 650 people fell victim to the border regime.

1982 Ruth First, journalist, academic and a prominent anti-apartheid activist, is assassinated in Maputo by a parcel bomb, sent by the South African Police.

2008 American swimmer Michael Phelps becomes the first person to win eight gold medals at one Olympic Games.

2012 Moscow bans gay pride events for a century.

2017 A van is driven into pedestrians in Barcelona, Spain, killing 14 people. | THE HISTORIAN