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
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| James Chaney |
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| Andrew Goodman |
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| Michael Schwerner |
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| 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
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| Just sayin', way too pretty and kind to die |
