Did you know about Johan de Witt
De Witt was elected Grand Pensionary of Holland, and together with his uncle Cornelis de Graeff, he controlled the Dutch political system from around 1650 until the Rampjaar of 1672.
Notable Deaths on August 20
August 20 has 110 recorded notable deaths across history, from 2 to 2024. This focused page highlights 20 people with the strongest available profile context.
1672 — Johan de Witt
Dutch mathematician and politician (born 1625)
By thisDay.info Editorial Team · — Wikipedia
Notable Deaths
110 source records
2 – 2024
Today in history
Major events on August 20
See what else happened on this day in history.
- 1858 Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's same theory. Source
- 1648 The Battle of Lens is the last major military confrontation of the Thirty Years' War, contributing to the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in October that year. Source
Did you know about Leona Helmsley
Although having initially received a sentence of 4 years, she was required to serve only 19 months in prison and two months under house arrest.
Did you know about Chi Chi DeVayne
DeVayne began her drag career in her native Shreveport, Louisiana, where she was known locally prior to her 2016 debut on Drag Race.
Did you know about B. K. S. Iyengar
B. K. S. Iyengar has been credited with popularizing yoga, first in India and then around the world.
Did you know about Rashid Minhas
Minhas was the first and only officer from the Pakistan Air Force to receive the Nishan-e-Haider, and was also the youngest person and the shortest-serving officer to have received the award.
More major people who died on August 20
Notable people are ranked by substantive profile depth and public notability.
2007
Leona Helmsley
American businesswoman (born 1920)
Leona Roberts Helmsley was an American businesswoman. After allegations of non-payment were made by contractors hired to improve Helmsley's Connecticut home, she was investigated and convicted of federal income tax evasion and other crimes in 1989. Although having initially received a sentence of 4 years, she was required to serve only 19 months in prison and two months under house arrest. During the trial, a former housekeeper testified that she had heard Helmsley say: "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes". This quote was identified with her for the rest of her life. Helmsley's flamboyant personality and reputation for tyrannical behavior, especially towards her employees, earned her the nickname Queen of Mean.
2020
Chi Chi DeVayne
American Drag Queen (born 1985)
Zavion Michael Davenport, better known by the stage name Chi Chi DeVayne, was an American drag queen and reality television personality who came to international attention on the eighth season of RuPaul's Drag Race and on the third season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. DeVayne began her drag career in her native Shreveport, Louisiana, where she was known locally prior to her 2016 debut on Drag Race. Following her time on the show, DeVayne embarked on a number of domestic and international tours, and she was featured on several web series about drag.
2014
B. K. S. Iyengar
Indian yoga instructor and author, founded Iyengar Yoga (born 1918)
Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was an Indian teacher of yoga and author. He is the founder of the style of yoga as exercise called "Iyengar Yoga", and was considered one of the foremost yoga gurus in the world. He was the author of many books on yoga practice and philosophy including Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and Light on Life. Iyengar was one of the earliest students of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who is often called "the father of modern yoga". He has been credited with popularizing yoga, first in India and then around the world.
1971
Rashid Minhas
Pakistani lieutenant and pilot (born 1951)
Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas NH was a Pakistani fighter pilot and the fifth recipient of Pakistan's highest military award, the Nishan-e-Haider. Minhas was the first and only officer from the Pakistan Air Force to receive the Nishan-e-Haider, and was also the youngest person and the shortest-serving officer to have received the award. During a routine training mission in August 1971, Minhas attempted to gain control of his jet trainer when his superior officer Flight Lieutenant Matiur Rahman BS took control of the plane to join the Bangladesh War of Independence, but Minhas resisted his efforts to control the aircraft and crashed it in Sujawal District in Pakistan.
1936
Edward Weston
English-American chemist (born 1850)
Edward Henry Weston was an American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes, and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and especially Californian, approach to modern photography" because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.
2011
Ram Sharan Sharma
Indian historian and academic (born 1919)
Ram Sharan Sharma was a Marxist historian and Indologist who specialised in the history of Ancient and early Medieval India. He taught at Patna University and Delhi University (1973–85) and was visiting faculty at University of Toronto (1965–1966). He also was a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a University Grants Commission National Fellow (1958–81) and the president of Indian History Congress in 1975. It was during his tenure as the dean of Delhi University's History Department that major expansion of the department took place in the 1970s. The creation of most of the positions in the department were the results of his efforts. He was the founding Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and a historian of international repute.
1996
Rio Reiser
German singer-songwriter (born 1950)
Ralph Christian Möbius, known professionally as Rio Reiser, was a German musician and from 1970 to 1985 the lead singer and main lyric-writer for the rock group Ton Steine Scherben. After that band broke up, he worked as a solo artist. Among his best known songs are Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht, Keine Macht für Niemand, and the Rauch-Haus-Song with the Ton Steine Scherben. As a solo artist, his best known songs are König von Deutschland, Alles Lüge, and Junimond. Reiser supported squatting in the early 1970s and later the green political party Die Grünen. After the German reunification, he joined the Party of Democratic Socialism.
1528
Georg von Frundsberg
German knight and landowner (born 1473)
Georg von Frundsberg was a German Knight, military, and Landsknecht leader in the service of the Holy Roman Empire and Imperial House of Habsburg. An early modern proponent of infantry tactics, he established his reputation in active service during the Italian Wars under Emperor Maximilian I and his successor Charles V. Even in his lifetime, he was referred to as "Vater der Landsknechte" and legends about him as the patriarchal figure of the Landsknechte or his incredible physical strength surfaced. He achieved great prestige and fame for his role in the Habsburg victory at Pavia against France and during the war of the League of Cognac.
1611
Tomás Luis de Victoria
Spanish priest and composer (born 1548)
Tomás Luis de Victoria was the most famous Spanish composer of the Renaissance. He stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus as among the principal composers of the late Renaissance, and was "admired above all for the intensity of some of his motets and of his Offices for the Dead and for Holy Week". His surviving oeuvre, unlike that of his colleagues, is almost exclusively sacred and polyphonic vocal music, set to Latin texts. As a Catholic priest, as well as an accomplished organist and singer, his career spanned both Spain and Italy. However, he preferred the life of a composer to that of a performer.
1985
Donald O. Hebb
Canadian psychologist and academic (born 1904)
Donald Olding Hebb was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His views on learning described behavior and thought in terms of brain function, explaining cognitive processes in terms of connections between neuron assemblies.
1859
Juan Bautista Ceballos
former president of Mexico (born 1811)
Juan Bautista Loreto Mucio Francisco José de Asís de la Santísima Trinidad Ceballos Gómez Sañudo (1811–1859) was a Mexican politician who served in congress and in the supreme court before being briefly made president after the resignation of President Mariano Arista during a revolution known as the Plan of Jalisco in 1853. He failed to come to any sort of arrangements with the insurgents and resigned after only about a month of serving and went back to his seat on the supreme court. After being removed from the court by the restored Santa Anna, he left the country and died in Paris in 1859.
1965
Jonathan Daniels
American seminarian and civil rights activist (born 1939)
Jonathan Myrick Daniels was an Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist. In 1965, he was killed by Tom Coleman, a highway worker and part-time deputy sheriff, in Hayneville, Alabama, while in the act of shielding 17-year-old Ruby Sales from a racist attack. He saved the life of the young Black civil rights activist. They were both working in the nonviolent civil rights movement in Lowndes County to integrate public places and register Black voters after passage of the Voting Rights Act that summer. Daniels' death generated further support for the civil rights movement.
1915
Paul Ehrlich
German physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1854)
Paul Ehrlich was a German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology and antimicrobial chemotherapy. He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Élie Metchnikoff "in recognition of their work on immunity". Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing an important modification of the technique for Gram staining bacteria. The methods he developed for staining tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the ability to diagnose numerous blood diseases.
2013
Ted Post
American director and screenwriter (born 1918)
Theodore Ian Post was an American film, television, and theatre director. He directed numerous episodes of well-known television series during the 1950s and '60s, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy and two Directors Guild of America Awards for his work. His feature film directing credits included the Clint Eastwood films Hang 'Em High (1968) and Magnum Force (1973), the Planet of the Apes film Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the Vietnam War film Go Tell the Spartans (1978), and the Chuck Norris action picture Good Guys Wear Black.
2012
Dom Mintoff
Maltese journalist and politician, 8th Prime Minister of Malta (born 1916)
Dominic Mintoff was a Maltese socialist politician, architect, and civil engineer who was leader of the Labour Party from 1949 to 1984, and was Prime Minister of Malta from 1955 to 1958, when Malta was still a British colony, and again, following independence, from 1971 to 1984. His tenure as Prime Minister saw the creation of a comprehensive welfare state, nationalisation of large corporations, a substantial increase in the general standard of living and the establishment of the Maltese republic, but was later on marred by accusations of authoritarianism.
2012
Mika Yamamoto
Japanese journalist (born 1967)
Mika Yamamoto was a Japanese video and photojournalist for the news agency Japan Press. Yamamoto was killed on 20 August 2012 while covering the Syrian Civil War in Aleppo, Syria. She was the first Japanese and fourth foreign journalist killed in the Syrian Civil War that began in March 2011. She was the fifteenth journalist killed in Syria in 2012. Yamamoto was a recipient of the Vaughn-Uyeda Memorial Prize of the Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association for her reporting of international affairs in 2004.
2013
Elmore Leonard
American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter (born 1925)
Elmore John Leonard Jr. was an American novelist, short story author and screenwriter. He was, according to British journalist Anthony Lane, "hailed as one of the best crime writers in the land". His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are Hombre, Swag, City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky, Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Out of Sight and Tishomingo Blues.
1995
Hugo Pratt
Italian author and illustrator (born 1927)
Ugo Eugenio Prat, better known as Hugo Pratt, was an Italian comic book creator who was known for combining strong storytelling with extensive historical research on works such as Corto Maltese. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2005, and was awarded the 15th anniversary special Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême at the Angoulême Festival. In 1946 Hugo Pratt became part of the so-called Group of Venice with Fernando Carcupino, Dino Battaglia and Damiano Damiani.
2008
Ed Freeman
American soldier and pilot, Medal of Honor recipient (born 1927)
Ed W. "Too Tall" Freeman was a United States Army helicopter pilot who received the United States military's highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his actions in the Battle of Ia Drang during the Vietnam War. During the battle, he flew through machine gunfire 14 times, bringing supplies to a trapped American battalion and flying dozens of wounded soldiers to safety. Freeman was a wingman for Major Bruce Crandall, who also received the Medal of Honor for the same missions.