Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.
480BC The Greek fleet under Themistocles defeats Xerxes I’s Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis as the smaller Greek navy of about 370 triremes bottle up the Persian ships in the narrow waters of the strait at Salamis. Coming soon after the Battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes has to postpone his planned land offensives for a year – a delay that gives the Greek city-states time to unite against him.
1652 A group of whites at the Cape climb Table Mountain for the first time, with Khoi chief Autshumao (also known as Harry) as their guide.
1911 Italy declares war on Turkey, starting the Italo-Turkish War, the first conflict to feature aerial bombardment.
1916 American oil tycoon John D Rockefeller becomes the world’s first billionaire.
1941 The Nazis and their collaborators begin mass killings at the Babi Yar ravine near Kyiv, Ukraine. It was the largest massacre during the Nazi campaign against the Soviet Union. Between 100 000 and 150 000 people – Soviet Jews, prisoners of war and communists – are killed.
1942 South African troops land at Tulearon (Toliara) on the south-west coast of Madagascar, to support the East African force based at Tananarive (Antananarivo).
1969 An earthquake, measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale, hits Tulbagh, Ceres and Wolseley, in the Cape, killing 11 people, leaving 1 000 homeless and destroying many historical buildings. At Tulbagh, seven people are killed.
1990 The YF-22, which later becomes the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, flies for the first time.
1999 Popular SA tenor and actor Gé Korsten, 71, commits suicide at his Wilderness home.
1969 Studying fossilised micro-organisms taken from 3.8 billion-year-old sedimentary rock at Barberton, Mpumalanga, geologists find evidence of life on Earth as early as about 3.4 billion years ago.
2009 An 8.0 magnitude earthquake near the Samoan Islands causes a tsunami, which causes nearly 200 deaths.
2013 Forty-two people are killed by Boko Harem in a college attack in Gujba, Nigeria.
2018 Rapper Kanye West announces on Twitter that he is changing his name to Ye.
2021 A prison riot between rival drug cartels in a jail in Ecuador results in 116 deaths, with some decapitated during the violence.