Topic summary
August 1991
Extracted from the Wikipedia article 1991.
August
- August 1 – Israel agrees to participate in the Madrid Conference of 1991, which opens on October 30.
- August 4 – The cruise liner MTS Oceanos sinks off the coast of South Africa, leading to the rescue of all 571 passengers on board by SAAF helicopters.
- August 6 – Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist working at CERN, announces the World Wide Web project and software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The first website, "info.cern.ch", is created.
- August 7 – Former Iranian prime ministerShapour Bakhtiar is assassinated in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes.
- August 8 – The Warsaw radio mast, the tallest structure in the world at the time, collapses.
- August 11 – Nickelodeon introduces its series of Nicktoons, with Doug, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show set three air premieres.
- August 17 – The remains of the Prussian KingFrederick the Great are re-interred in Potsdam, Germany.
- August 17–20 – Hurricane Bob hits North Carolina and New England, killing 17 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage.
- August 19 – Dissolution of the Soviet Union: Soviet PresidentMikhail Gorbachev is put under house arrest while vacationing in Crimea during an attempted coup. Led by Vice PresidentGennady Yanayev and seven others, the coup collapses in less than 72 hours and is protested by over 100,000 people outside the parliament building. Gorbachev returns to Moscow three days later and arrests the coup leaders.
- August 20 – Singing Revolution: Estonia declares independence from the Soviet Union, followed by Latvia the next day.
- August 22 – Singing Revolution: Iceland becomes the first nation to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. It is followed by the U.S. on September 2 and the Soviet Union on September 6.
- August 23 – Dissolution of the Soviet Union: Russia restores the white-blue-red tricolour as its national flag.
- August 24 – Dissolution of the Soviet Union: Ukraine declares independence, followed by Belarus the next day, from the Soviet Union.
- August 25
- Dissolution of Yugoslavia: Serbian forces begin an attack on the Croatian town of Vukovar.
- Linus Torvalds posts messages to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix, regarding the new operating system kernel he has developed, called Linux.
- Michael Schumacher, regarded as one of the greatest Formula One drivers in history, makes his Formula One debut at the Belgian Grand Prix.