August 19, 1936

1936Richard McBrien, American priest, theologian, and academic (died 2015)^[†]

Richard Peter McBrien was a Catholic priest, theologian, and writer who was the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame near South Bend, Indiana. He authored twenty-five books, including the popular Catholicism, a reference text on the Church after the Second Vatican Council.

1936Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet, playwright, and director (born 1898)^[†]

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting mostly of poets who introduced the tenets of European movements into Spanish literature.

1936The Great Purge of the Soviet Union begins when the first of the Moscow Trials is convened.^[†]

The Great Purge or Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev in 1934, Joseph Stalin launched a series of show trials known as the Moscow trials to remove suspected dissenters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The term "great purge" was popularized by historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book, The Great Terror, whose title alluded to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.