AUGUST 20
1968:First Secretary Alexander Dubček's liberalization movement, the
"Prague Spring," is crushed when Czechoslovakia is invaded by 200,000
troops from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, who occupy the
country and crush anti-Soviet protests.
1882: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky debuts his 1812 Overture
at the 1882 Moscow Exhibition, commemorating the 70th anniversary of
the defeat of Napoleon's Russian invasion. Although Tchaikovsky himself
finds the piece "very loud and noisy," it is one of his best-known
compositions.
1897: British medical officer Sir Ronald Ross discovers malaria parasites in the stomach of mosquitoes,
proving that the insects can transmit the disease to human patients.
Ross will be awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902, and those
mosquitoes will also get some recognition — Aug. 20 will become World
Mosquito Day, an effort to recognize that malaria is still a prevalent
and deadly tropical disease.
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