On this day · archive
The Peace Palace opens its doors
Queen Wilhelmina opened the Peace Palace in The Hague in 1913, placing an institution for international arbitration inside a building meant to outlast any single dispute.
8
events in todayish file
1913
Queen Wilhelmina opens the Peace Palace in The Hague.
The new building gave international arbitration a permanent address and architecture designed to make peaceful settlement visible.
Queen Wilhelmina opened the Peace Palace in The Hague on August 28, 1913. The building gave international arbitration and legal scholarship a prominent, permanent address.
Its architecture made a proposition in public: disputes between states could be brought into rooms built for argument, evidence, and judgment rather than settled only through force.
The following year, Europe entered a catastrophic war. That timing exposed the limits of institutions, but not their absence of value; a place devoted to law remained part of the longer effort to make peaceful settlement durable.
The full record
8 entries from the day’s archive, filed year by year with a note on what each one leaves behind.
Phoenix shooting: A man opens fire on pedestrians outside of a hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, resulting in the deaths of three people, including the perpetrator.
The attack killed two victims before the gunman also died.
Violence
NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery launches on STS-128.
Discovery’s launch began a mission to deliver equipment and research supplies to the International Space Station.
Space
In "one of the most complicated and bizarre crimes in the annals of the FBI", Brian Wells dies after becoming involved in a complex plot involving a bank robbery, a scavenger hunt, and a homemade explosive device.
The death became the center of a complex bank-robbery and explosive-device investigation.
Crime
Second Congo War: Loyalist troops backed by Angolan and Zimbabwean forces repulse the RCD and Rwandan offensive on Kinshasa.
Regional military support helped loyalist forces halt the offensive on Kinshasa.
Conflict
The Workers' Party of North Korea, predecessor of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, is founded at a congress held in Pyongyang, North Korea.
The organization became a predecessor of North Korea’s ruling party.
Politics
Queen Wilhelmina opens the Peace Palace in The Hague.
The building provided a permanent home for international arbitration and law.
Civic
Silliman University is founded in the Philippines. It is the first American private school in the country.
The university became the Philippines’ first American private school.
Education
Richard Wagner's Lohengrin premieres at the Staatskapelle Weimar.
Wagner’s opera received its first performance in Weimar.
Culture