August 26 Birthday
On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was certified by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. Women had won the right to vote. The struggle had lasted seventy-two years, from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to this day. Women voted in the 1920 presidential election — but the amendment applied to white women. Native American women were not citizens until 1924, Asian American women faced citizenship restrictions, and Black women in the South were denied the vote through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The amendment was the beginning, not the end, of women's suffrage. Krakatoa began erupting on August 26, 1883. The island volcano, in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, produced four massive explosions on August 27. The fourth was the loudest sound ever recorded — it ruptured eardrums forty miles away and was heard 3,000 miles away. The shock wave circled the Earth seven times. Tsunamis killed 36,000 people. The eruption injected so much ash into the atmosphere that global temperatures dropped by 2.2°F and sunsets were spectacular for years — the "year without a summer" effects. Edvard Munch's The Scream is sometimes attributed to the sky effects from Krakatoa. People born on August 26 fall under the zodiac sign of Virgo. The birthstone is Peridot and the birth flower is Gladiolus. Historical events on August 26 include 1920: 19th Amendment certified, granting women the vote (Women's Equality Day), 1883: Krakatoa begins erupting (largest eruption in modern history), 1978: Albino Luciani elected Pope John Paul I (dies after 33 days). Famous people born on August 26 include Lee De Forest (1873), Guccio Gucci (1881), Christopher Isherwood (1904).