Friday, 21 August is the International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, marked by the UN for the ninth time this year under the theme "Healing through Memory." It is also, by coincidence of the calendar, a date that has twice redrawn a map — of a nation, and of a museum wall.
On this day
1911Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre employee, walked out of the closed museum with the Mona Lisa hidden under his clothes. The theft was not even noticed until the following day, and the painting stayed missing for over two years.Lafitte, Pierre (1872-1938). Directeur de publication via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
1959President Dwight Eisenhower signed the proclamation admitting Hawaii as the 50th US state, and ordered a new flag with 50 stars in staggered rows of six and five — a design that only became official the following July.White House via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
1995IndiaSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar died in Chicago at 84. The Lahore-born astrophysicist had worked out, as a teenager, the mass limit above which a dying star cannot settle into a white dwarf — the calculation that won him a share of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.Startchild Project NASA via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Did you know
The Mona Lisa was a minor work by Leonardo's standards until it was stolen. During the two years it was missing, crowds queued at the Louvre to look at the empty space where it had hung — and the painting came back more famous than it had ever been on the wall.