TODAY IN HISTORY
August 21, 1415: Portuguese forces under King John I and his son Henrique, the future “Prince Henry the Navigator,” capture the city of Ceuta from the Moroccan Marinid dynasty. Ceuta was the first possession in what would become the Portuguese Empire and served as a staging ground for the Portuguese to capture several other cities around the northwest African coast. It’s a Spanish city today—Madrid kept it after the 16th-17th century Iberian Union broke apart.
August 21, 1791: Slaves in Saint-Domingue attend a Vodou ceremony in the evening and afterward begin a mass uprising. This insurrection marked the start of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in the Americas. Haiti won its independence from France, effective on January 1, 1804. The impact of the revolution on slavery in the Americas continues to be a matter of scholarly debate, but at the time the uprising so terrified US slaveholders that the Jefferson administration imposed an embargo on Haiti that remained in place until 1862.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Israeli soldiers and settler militants killed at least two Palestinians in the West Bank on Friday. A settler mob gunned down a 17 year old in the village of Khirbet Hamroush, near Hebron, while soldiers killed one man during a raid in the city of Jenin. Elsewhere in the territory, the Israeli siege of the village of Qusra is about to conclude its second week and the Israeli soldiers who were ostensibly deployed there to protect its Palestinian residents have apparently joined the siege instead. Palestinian media reports that they are preventing the besieged families from leaving and also preventing supplies from coming in. Who could have predicted, really.
