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FILE NO. 08.28 5 specimens · est. 1789-1963

What happened on August 28?

Real photographs, all filed under this date. Name each event before you read on.
Case Timeline 1789-1963 · 174 years
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What happened on August 28

All 5 specimens from this file, spanning 1789 to 1963, with the story behind each photograph.

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  1. Black-and-white photograph of a man in a suit waving to an enormous crowd stretching toward a distant obelisk monument.
    Civil Rights · 1963

    Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech

    From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King addressed roughly 250,000 people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The speech's closing, largely improvised section became one of the most quoted passages in American oratory.

  2. Old scientific diagram showing hand-drawn irregular blotchy shapes with compass and angle markings.
    Science · 1859

    The most powerful geomagnetic storm ever recorded strikes Earth

    Astronomer Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots when he saw an intense flare erupt from the group shown here. The resulting storm - the Carrington Event - lit up auroras as far south as the Caribbean and set telegraph equipment on fire.

  3. Photograph of a bright icy moon covered in craters and long blue fracture lines, against black space.
    Astronomy · 1789

    William Herschel discovers Saturn's moon Enceladus

    Herschel spotted Enceladus using the largest telescope in the world at the time, his own 40-foot reflector. (This close-up view is modern - captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2005, nearly two centuries after the moon's discovery.)

  4. Black-and-white photograph of a baseball player in a Brooklyn cap mid-swing, bat raised over his shoulder.
    Sports · 1945

    Branch Rickey tells Jackie Robinson he'll break baseball's color line

    In a private meeting, Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey told Robinson he wanted him to become the first Black player in modern Major League Baseball - and to not fight back against the abuse he knew was coming. Robinson debuted in April 1947.

  5. Old engraving of a crowd gathered outdoors around a man reading from a paper, with a plantation house and windmill behind them.
    History · 1833

    The Slavery Abolition Act receives royal assent in Britain

    The Act outlawed slavery across most of the British Empire, freeing over 800,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean, Africa and Canada - though it kept many as unpaid "apprentices" for years afterward and compensated slave owners, not the enslaved.