Historic Events in August

History

August 1



Aug. 1, 1944: Anne Frank penned her last diary entry. She died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on March 15, 1945, at age 15

 

 

 

 

August 2

Aug. 2, 1923: President Warren G. Harding dies suddenly in a San Francisco hotel
August 2, 1939: Albert Einstein writes a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt concerning atomic weapons. 6 years later, on Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima

August 3

August 3, 1905: Maggie Kuhn was born. She's the founder of the Gray Panthers, a group dedicated to fighting age discrimination. Her group succeeded in banning mandatory retirement
Aug. 3, 1900: Ernie Pyle, a war correspondent, was born in Dana, Indiana. His work offered sympathetic insights into the lives of WWII soldiers. After receiving a Pulitzer Prize for the 1940 bombing of London, and war reports from Sicily, Africa, France, he was later killed by gunfire in Okinawa in the South Pacific on April 18, 1945

August 4

Aug. 4, 1962: Anti-Apartheid activist Nelson Mandela is arrested by South African police
Aug. 4, 1964: 3 civil rights activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, were found killed and buried in an earth-made dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. They were there to increase black voted registration. And what made the case more interesting is that a Columbo crime family capo named Gregory "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa helped the case. He had tactics in interrogation not known to police. When he arrived in Mississippi, he kidnapped and pistol-whipped Lawrence Byrd, a TV salesman and secret Klansman. He took him to Camp Shelby, an Army base and beat him severely and stuck a gun down his throat. This led to him confessing where the graves were


James Chaney

Andrew Goodman



Michael Schwerner

Gregory "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa

Aug. 4, 1901: Louis Armstrong is born in New Orleans

Aug. 4, 1961: current President Barack Obama is born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas

August 5

Aug. 5, 1962: Film star Marilyn Monroe died at 36 from a sleeping pill overdose

August 6

Aug. 6, 1962: Jamaica receives independence from British ad Spanish rule

August 7

Aug. 7, 1964: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is signed, stating "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the United States"

August 8

Aug. 8, 1945: Soviet Russia declares war on Japan

August 9

Aug. 9, 1945: the second atomic bomb is dropped from an American B-29 bomber on Nagasaki. The original target was a town called Kokura, but with poor visibility, Nagasaki gets bombed instead

August 11

Aug. 11-16, 1965: Six days of rioting in the L.A. streets, beginning in the Watts section of L.A. as a result of a dispute between a white member of the California Highway Patrol and a black motorist
Aug. 11, 1921: Roots author Alex Haley is born in Ithaca, New York.

August 12

Aug. 12, 1881: Film pioneer Cecil B. DeMille is born

August 13

Aug. 13, 1961: The Berlin Wall goes up, separating Berlin into West Berlin and East Berlin

Aug. 13, 1899: British film director Alfred Hitchcock is born in London. His suspense films always ended with morals

August 15

Aug. 15, 1969: Woodstock begins in a field near Yasgur's Farm in Bethel, New York. The 3 day concert featured 24 rock bands and drew more than 300,000 free spirited people. It has since then become the trademark symbol of the hippie movement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 16

Aug. 16, 1977: Elvis Presley pronounced dead at Memphis Baptist Hospital at 3:30pm, age 42

August 17

Aug. 17, 1998: Bill Clinton became the first president to give testimony before a grand jury, where he was the focus of the investigation for sexual harassment

August 18

August 18, 1920: 19th Amendment signed, giving women the right to vote

August 19

Aug. 19, 1991: Soviet supporters remove Mikhail Gorbachev from power
Aug. 19, 1871: Orville Wright was born in Dayton, Ohio

 

August 21

Aug. 21, 1863: During the American Civil War, William Quantrill led  450 Confederate raiders on a terrorist raid of Lawrence, Kansas, leaving more than 150 people dead, more than 30 injured

August 22

Aug. 22, 1986: Poisonous fumes leak from a volcanic eruption under Lake Nios in Cameroon, killing 1,500+ people

August 23

Aug. 23, 1927: Italian immigrants Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are electrocuted in the electric chair in a Charlestown, Massachusetts prison. They were convicted of robbing a shoe factory payroll during which the paymaster and a guard were killed. Evidence supported the fact they were associated with an organized criminal gang. During these days, the mob was just beginning to get it's foothold in the US

August 24

Aug. 24, 79 A.D.: Vesuvius, the famed volcano in southern Italy, erupts, destroying the towns of Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum

August 25

Aug. 25, 1985: 11 year old American school girl Samantha Smith dies in a plane crash in Maine. She had done a bold task, writing a letter to Soviet Russia's leader Yuri Andropov, asking year-old American schoolgirl had written a letter to Soviet Russia's leader Yuri Andropov asking, "Why do you want to conquer the whole world, or at least our country?" To her surprise, he offered to fly her to the U.S.S.R. and she toured Russia for two weeks and this came to symbolize American and Russian hopes for peace

August 26

Aug. 26, 1883: one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in history, next to Vesuvius, Krakatoa. It's on the Indonesian island of the same name. Explosions were heard 2,000 miles away, tidal waves as high as 120 feet killed 36,000 people on nearby islands, while five cubic miles of earth were blasted into the sky as high as 50 miles

August 27

Aug. 27, 1910: "Mother Teresa" was born in Skopje, Yuogslavia. She founded a religious order of nuns in Calcutta, India and spent her life working with and helping the poor and sick of India

August 28

Aug. 28, 1963: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of Washington D.C.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 30

Aug. 30, 1979: Frankenstein author Mary Shelley is born in London

Aug. 30, 1901: Civil rights activist Roy Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Mississippi. He was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 31

Aug. 31, 1997: Britain's Princess Diana dies at age 36 from massive internal bleeding resulting from a high speed car crash. She had recently divorced Prince Charles and the paparazzi were dogging her every step

Just sayin', way too pretty and kind to die