Friday, Jan. 2:

1920 : Raids ordered by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and facilitated by a young J. Edgar Hoover led to the unlawful arrest and detention of 3,000 to 10,000 people in over 30 cities who were accused of being communists and anarchists.

1959 : Luna 1 was launched by the Soviet Union. It was the first spacecraft to escape Earth’s orbit, first craft to reach the Moon and to be placed in a heliocentric orbit.

1974 : President Richard Nixon signed the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which set a new national maximum speed limit to 55 mph on all national highways, in response to the OPEC crisis at the time.

Thursday, Jan. 1:

45 BC : A new calendar, commissioned by Roman dictator Julius Caesar, entered into effect.

1772 : The London Credit Exchange Company issued the first traveler’s check.

1818 : 'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus' was first published anonymously by Mary Shelley in London.

1863: President Abraham Lincoln signed and issued the groundbreaking Emancipation Proclamation, which called for slaves within the Confederate states to be freed. It affected more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans at that time.

1892 : Annie Moore, a 15-year-old Irish immigrant, became the very first person to be processed on Ellis Island.

1994 : The North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico went into effect, removing many trade and tariffs barriers between the three countries.

Sunday, Sept. 6:

1781: Benedict Arnold, a former Patriot officer already infamous for betraying the American cause the previous year, ordered his British command to burn his hometown of New London, Connecticut. As a turncoat, he led British and Hessian troops in the brutal attack on the small coastal city, which was an important center for mercantile trade and military strategy.

1870: Fifty years before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, Louisa Ann Swain became the first woman in the United States to vote in a general election. She cast her ballot in Laramie, Wyoming, which had granted women the right to vote the previous year.

1901: President William McKinley was shot twice at close range by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley died eight days later. Initially, doctors believed he would survive despite only one bullet being removed. However, at the autopsy, they discovered gangrene from the bullet’s path caused septic shock and led to his death.

1943: Pennsylvania Railroad’s premier train, the Congressional Limited, derailed at Frankford Junction in Philadelphia, killing 79 people and injuring 117 others. The derailment was caused by an overheated journal box that led to an axle breaking as the train passed through the junction.

1946: James F. Byrnes, secretary of state under President Harry Truman, announced a policy of economic reconstruction for postwar Germany in a speech delivered at Stuttgart’s opera house. Byrnes reassured the German people the United States would support their nation’s recovery and selfgovernment, emphasizing the commitment to maintain U.S. troops in Germany.

1966: South African prime minister and architect of apartheid Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was assassinated. Dimitri Tsafendas, a Greek-Mozambican working as a parliamentary messenger, stabbed Verwoerd to death during a parliamentary meeting in Cape Town.

1975: Teen tennis prodigy Martina Navratilova sought political asylum in the United States after defecting from communist Czechoslovakia. The 18year-old announced her plan to defect after playing at the U.S. Open, where she lost to rival Chris Evert. Later, Navratilova became a U.S. citizen and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2001.

1997: Approximately 2.5 billion viewers worldwide watched the televised funeral of Princess Diana, making it one of the most-watched events in television history. The ceremony was held at Westminster Abbey and included a procession through the streets of London, with millions of mourners lining the route to pay their respects to the “People’s Princess.”

2012: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination for a second term in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. The president sought to show supporters that the achievements of his administration would be wiped out if Republican opponent Mitt Romney won the election.

2018: Off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger fatally shot an unarmed Black man, Botham Jean, in Jean’s apartment after Guyger entered it, believing it was her own. Guyger was initially charged with manslaughter, sparking protests and accusations of racism. On Oct. 1, 2019, she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Saturday, Sept. 5:

1774: The First Continental Congress met at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia. Delegates from 12 of Britain’s 13 American colonies convened to discuss their rights and address the escalating tensions with Britain.

1836: After leading the Texan Army to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto – the decisive conflict in Texas’ war for independence against Mexico – Sam Houston was elected president of the newly founded Republic of Texas. He served two terms as the republic’s president and subsequently became a U.S. senator and governor of the state of Texas.

1958: “Doctor Zhivago,” Boris Pasternak’s romantic novel, was published in the United States. Despite being banned in the Soviet Union until 1987, the tale about the effects of the 1917 Russian Revolution on a bourgeois family contributed to Pasternak winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

1960: Cassius Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali, won the light heavyweight boxing competition at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Despite being just 18 years old, he won all four of his fights with ease, ultimately defeating three-time European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski in the final to secure the gold medal.

1972: The “Munich massacre” occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. Eight members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village and took 11 Israeli athletes hostage. The situation ended tragically with all hostages, along with a German police officer and five of the perpetrators, being killed after a failed rescue attempt.

1975: President Gerald R. Ford survived an assassination attempt in Sacramento, California. A young woman, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme – a member of the notorious Charles Manson family – was tackled by Secret Service agents after aiming a gun at Ford. Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Ford while he was in San Francisco.

1976: The first episode of “The Muppet Show,” co-created by Jim Henson, premiered in Great Britain with guest star Joel Grey. Over the next five years, the series – with a cast of puppet characters led by Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy – was shown in over 100 countries.

1984: The Space Shuttle Discovery landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California following its maiden voyage. The crew deployed three communications satellites into orbit during a six-day mission, while also conducting scientific experiments and testing a large experimental solar array.

2001: Astronomers announced an observation of energy flares that provided some of the strongest evidence yet of the theorized black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, a sophisticated orbiting telescope, detected an X-ray flare leaping from the center of the Milky Way into oblivion, offering nearly conclusive proof.

2006: Katie Couric debuted as anchor and managing editor of “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.” The former host of NBC’s “Today” became the first solo female anchor of a weekday evening newscast on a major U.S. broadcast network as 13.6 million viewers tuned in.

Friday, Sept. 4:

1781: Los Angeles was established by 44 Spanish settlers as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles (the Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels). The land was originally inhabited by the Indigenous Tongva people, who welcomed Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542 but remained the primary inhabitants until the establishment of the city by the Spanish settlers.

1886: Apache leader Geronimo surrendered to U.S. government troops after 30 years of battling to protect his tribe’s homeland. Gen. Nelson Miles accepted Geronimo’s surrender in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona.

1888: American inventor George Eastman registered the trademark Kodak on the same day he obtained a patent for his roll film camera. The camera made photography accessible to the general public with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest,” signifying the ease of use that allowed amateurs to take photographs without the need for a darkroom.

1923: The USS Shenandoah, the first of the U.S. Navy’s rigid airships, made its maiden flight in Lakehurst, New Jersey. It was the first airship filled with helium instead of hydrogen, which improved its safety and operational capabilities.

1951: The first live transcontinental television broadcast took place when President Harry S. Truman delivered the opening speech for the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. The broadcast, facilitated by cutting-edge microwave technology, reached 87 stations across 47 cities.

1957: Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to prevent nine Black students, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” from entering the segregated Central High School in Little Rock. The move was in direct violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The standoff drew national attention and led to President Dwight D. Eisenhower sending federal troops to enforce the students’ right to attend the school.

1972: “The Price Is Right” debuted on CBS as a revival of the original 1956 game show, introducing many distinctive gameplay elements that have become iconic to the program. Bob Barker served as the longest-running host from its debut until his retirement in June 2007, when Drew Carey took over.

1998: Google was founded by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, marking the beginning of what became the world’s most popular search engine. The name is a play on the word “googol,” which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders’ mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the internet.

2002: Kelly Clarkson, a 20-year-old cocktail waitress from Texas, defeated Justin Guarini to become the inaugural winner of “American Idol.” She was awarded a recording contract and went on to become a platinum-selling artist and talk-show host.

2016: Mother Teresa was proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis during a canonization ceremony at the Vatican. The Roman Catholic nun, who dedicated her life to caring for the destitute in India, officially became Saint Teresa of Calcutta nearly 20 years after her death on Sept. 5, 1997.

Thursday, Sept. 3:

1752: The British Empire, aligning its calendar with the Gregorian calendar used in Europe, skipped 11 days to correct discrepancies. The adjustment meant that after Sept. 2, 1752, the next day was declared to be Sept. 14, 1752, effectively erasing the dates of Sept. 3-13 from that year.

1777: This date is traditionally accepted as the first time the U.S. flag was flown in battle, during a Revolutionary War clash at Cooch’s Bridge, Delaware. Gen. William Maxwell ordered the newly designed Stars and Stripes raised as a detachment of his infantry and cavalry defeated an advance guard of British and Hessian troops.

1783: The Treaty of Paris was signed between the American colonies and Great Britain, ending the Revolutionary War and officially recognizing the United States as an independent nation. Great Britain formally ceded most of its territory east of the Mississippi River, effectively doubling the size of the new nation and paving the way for its westward expansion.

1838: Renowned abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery to freedom. Disguised as a sailor and carrying borrowed freedom papers, Douglass — born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey — traveled from Maryland by train, ferry and on foot to New York City and freedom in less than 24 hours.

1925: The USS Shenandoah, America’s first domestically built rigid airship, crashed during a promotional tour in the Midwest, killing 14 members of her 42-man crew. While flying over southeast Ohio, the Shenandoah encountered a powerful squall line that tore the airship apart.

1976: NASA’s Viking 2 spacecraft successfully landed on Mars at Utopia Planitia following the earlier landing of its sibling, Viking 1. Both were part of NASA’s mission to investigate the Red Planet and search for signs of life.

1981: The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979, was instituted after being ratified by nearly 100 nations. It serves as an international bill of rights for women, obligating the ratifying countries to ensure women’s rights in political, economic, social, cultural, civil and other fields.

1995: E-commerce site eBay, originally called AuctionWeb, was founded by French-born Iranian American entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar. The first item sold on the platform was a broken laser pointer, which surprisingly fetched $14.83, indicating the unique potential of this new form of commerce.

2012: Notorious Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, also known as the “Godmother of Cocaine,” was assassinated in Medellín, Colombia, at the age of 69. Blanco’s death marked the end of a violent chapter in drug trafficking, as she was a key figure in the Miami cocaine drug wars during the 1970s and ’80s.

2016: China and the United States, the world’s largest carbon emitters, formally ratified the Paris Agreement, aiming to curb climate-warming emissions and accelerate global efforts to combat climate change. The pact officially entered into force Nov. 4, 2016.

Wednesday, Sept. 2:

1789: The first Congress of the United States established the Department of the Treasury, creating a permanent institution for managing government finances. The department included key officers such as the secretary of the treasury, comptroller, auditor, treasurer and an assistant to the secretary.

1901: Vice President Theodore Roosevelt used the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick” at the Minnesota State Fair to outline his ideal foreign policy. Two weeks later, Roosevelt assumed the presidency, and his leadership was characterized by “Big Stick diplomacy,” which involves careful negotiation (“speaking softly” ) backed by the implicit threat of a formidable military (“big stick” ).

1944: During World War II, future U.S. President George H. W. Bush, then a 20-year-old Navy aviator, led a squadron in an attack on a Japanese installation in Chichijima. After his plane was shot down by enemy fire, he was rescued four hours later by an American submarine.

1945: Representatives of Japan signed a formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially marking the end of World War II. The document was signed by representatives from Japan and Allied nations including the United States, China, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The day was officially named Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day) by President Harry S. Truman.

1963: “The CBS Evening News” transitioned from a 15-minute broadcast to network television’s first half-hour weeknight news program. Its 6:30 p.m. EST debut featured anchor Walter Cronkite’s exclusive interview with President John F. Kennedy.

1969: America’s first automatic teller machine was unveiled at Chemical Bank in Rockville Centre, New York. The ATM had made its international debut a little over two years earlier, on June 27, 1967, at a Barclays branch in north London.

1969: Ho Chi Minh, a key figure in Vietnam’s fight for independence, died of a heart attack in Hanoi, North Vietnam. His death marked the end of an era for Vietnam, as he had been the key figure of Vietnamese communism and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from its establishment in 1945.

1995: Michael Jackson achieved his 12th and final solo No. 1 hit with “You Are Not Alone,” a single from his ninth solo album, “HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I.” The R. Kelly-produced track also holds a Guinness World Record as the first song to enter the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart at No. 1.

2008: Google Chrome, the popular web browser, was first publicly released as a beta version. Its release introduced features that have since become standard, such as the omnibox and the emphasis on speed and security.

2013: Diana Nyad, on her fifth attempt, became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the use of a shark cage for protection. At age 64, she completed the 110-mile, 53-hour swim from Havana to Key West, navigating through the jellyfish and shark-infested waters of the Straits of Florida.

Tuesday, Sept. 1:

1807: Former Vice President Aaron Burr faced treason charges for allegedly plotting to create an independent nation by seizing land on the U.S. frontier and Spanish territories. Despite the high-profile trial, Burr was acquitted due to a lack of concrete evidence.

1891: Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson became the first woman to be licensed as a physician in Alabama. After graduating with honors from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh native passed a rigorous examination, making history in a field dominated by men. She served as the resident physician at the Tuskegee Institute, providing health care to students and staff.

1897: Boston’s subway, the first electric underground system in the United States, launched with over 100,000 passengers on its opening day. Originally built to alleviate the congestion on Boston’s streets, the subway set the precedent for urban transit systems across the country.

1914: Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her death at an estimated age of 29 marked the extinction of the species, which had once been North America’s most abundant bird. Martha’s body was preserved and is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution.

1952: Ernest Hemingway’s novella “The Old Man and the Sea” was first published in its entirety in Life magazine, selling a remarkable 5.3 million copies within two days. Released as a book by Scribner’s a week later, the story received widespread acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953.

1972: Bobby Fischer became the first native-born American to win the World Chess Championship by defeating the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland. Often referred to as the “Match of the Century,” it symbolized a significant Cold War victory for the United States.

1979: Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to make a close approach to Saturn, passing within about 13,000 miles of the planet’s cloud tops at approximately 71,000 miles per hour. Pioneer 11 provided unprecedented insights into the ringed planet and its moons, marking a milestone in space exploration.

1985: The remains of the RMS Titanic were discovered by a joint U.S.-French expedition led by American oceanographer Robert Ballard and French oceanographer Jean-Louis Michel. The wreck was found about 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, at a depth of approximately 13,000 feet, marking the end of a 73-year mystery since the ship sank in 1912.

1998: A federal law mandated that all new cars and light trucks sold in the United States must be equipped with airbags on both sides of the front seat. This requirement, stemming from the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, marked a significant advancement in vehicle safety standards.

2001: The U.S. Postal Service issued the first stamp celebrating Muslim holidays. The 34-cent stamp, designed by calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya of Arlington, Virginia, featured gold Arabic calligraphy and the words “EID GREETINGS,” honoring the holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

Monday, Aug. 31:

12: The future Roman emperor and despot Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, better known as Caligula, was born in Antium. His father’s soldiers in Germany gave him his nickname, which means “bootikins,” because he paraded around in a wee soldier’s uniform.

1842: Journalist, suffragist and civil rights activist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was born in Boston. She edited Women’s Era, the first newspaper published by and for Black women. She also founded the Women’s Era Club for socially active Black women and the National Federation of Afro-American Women.

1897: Thomas Edison received a patent for his Kinetograph moving-picture camera. It took 30 pictures per second, without sound. He had filed for the patent six years earlier and already made numerous short silent films.

1909: Chemist Paul Ehrlich tested what is now recognized as the first chemotherapy drug, injecting arsphenamine, his team’s 606th compound, into a rabbit that had been infected with syphilitic ulcers. The illness was gone within a day and the ulcers within a month.

1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the first of a series of isolationist acts attempting to keep the United States out of international conflicts. The Neutrality Act forbade the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” to foreign countries at war and required U.S. arms manufacturers to apply for export licenses.

1939: Marvel Comics No. 1 was published, featuring Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner and Ka-Zar the Great, and launching a comics empire. Seventy years later to the day, the Walt Disney Company announced it was buying Marvel Entertainment for $4.24 billion.

1992: The 11-day standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, ended as self-declared White supremacist Randy Weaver surrendered to the FBI and U.S. marshals. His wife, his son and a marshal had been shot dead during the siege.

1994: The Irish Republican Army declared its first ceasefire after 25 years of armed struggle in Northern Ireland.

1997: Princess Diana died at 36 in a car crash in Paris. Her boyfriend, Dodi Al Fayed, and driver, Henri Paul, died as well. A French judge blamed Paul, who had been drinking and had taken prescription drugs; a British inquest blamed both Paul and the paparazzi who were giving chase.

Sunday, Aug. 30:

1800: In the first major rebellion of enslaved people in the United States, Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith, gathered an army of about 1,000 outside Richmond, Virginia. The plan was thwarted by heavy rain that delayed the meeting. Gabriel and 25 others were hanged; two enslaved people who told their enslavers about the plot were freed.

1890: President Benjamin Harrison signed the Second Morrill Act, requiring states to either establish and fund land-grant universities for people of color or show that their existing land-grant universities were not only for White people. The goal was to ensure that Black people and historically Black colleges and universities could conduct research and host extension services for their communities.

1890: President Benjamin Harrison signed the first U.S. law requiring federal inspection of meat. It required the Department of Agriculture to inspect imported cattle and exported salt pork and bacon. The law came in response to several European countries that had banned U.S. pork imports due to trichinosis.

1918: Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin was shot twice in an assassination attempt in Moscow by Fanya Kaplan of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin survived; Kaplan did not, being shot four days later. In response, the Bolsheviks took actions against their political opponents, executing thousands of people.

1963: The White House/Kremlin “Hot Line” communications link went into service to allow direct messaging between the U.S. and Soviet governments in case of crisis. Contrary to the popular image of the “red telephone,” it was not a phone but a telegraph.

1966: Congress confirmed Constance Baker Motley as a U.S. district judge, the first Black woman on the federal bench. She was already the first Black woman to argue cases before the Supreme Court — winning James Meredith the right to attend the University of Mississippi — among other firsts. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson acknowledged Motley when she was nominated to the Supreme Court.

1967: The Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice, 69-11, after six hours of debate. The famed civil rights litigator had won most of the cases he argued before the high court, most notably Brown v. Board of Education.

1983: Guion S. Bluford Jr. became the first Black American astronaut to enter space. An aerospace engineer and Air Force pilot who flew 144 combat missions in the Vietnam War, he took three more trips into space.

2001: The International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague told Slobodan Miloševic?that he would be charged with genocide in Bosnia and Croatia. He was the first former head of state to be prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal. The former Yugoslav president was unrepentant and died while his trial was still underway.

2021: The last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, ending a 20-year mission with the Taliban back in power. The withdrawal was chaotic and widely criticized.

Saturday, Aug. 29:

1533: The 300-year Inca Empire came to an end with the execution by strangling of Atahuallpa by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro.

1842: China signed the Treaty of Nanjing, ending the First Opium War. The first of several unequal treaties foreign countries imposed on China, it required China to open five ports to Britain, pay $21 million and cede Hong Kong to Britain, among other privileges.

1867: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs pleaded for the repeal of anti-gay laws before 500 members of the Congress of German Jurists. He was the first avowedly gay person to make such a request. “I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt,” he said later.

1893: Whitcomb L. Judson patented his “clasp locker”: a sliding shoe closure that engaged and disengaged a series of interlacing teeth in a single movement. It evolved into the zipper.

1911: “Ishi,” believed to be the last member of the Yahi tribe, was found lost and starving at a slaughterhouse in Oroville, California. Officials brought him to a museum, where he lived for the rest of his life. “Ishi” means “man” in the Yana language; he refused to share his name without an introduction by a fellow Yahi.

1949: The USSR tested its first atomic bomb, ending the U.S. atomic monopoly. The Soviets called it “First Lightning” and Americans called it “Joe No. 1,” after Stalin. Thanks to a Los Alamos spy who stole blueprints, the bomb was a copy of the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

1957: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal legislation protecting racial minorities since Reconstruction. It created the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and authorized the attorney general to sue on behalf of Black people blocked from voting.

1962: President John F. Kennedy acknowledged concerns about the health and environmental effects of DDT and other pesticides in response to a question at a news conference. The Agriculture Department and Public Health Service “are examining the matter,” he said, and referenced Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring.”

1970: More than 20,000 Mexican Americans marched through East Los Angeles, calling themselves the Chicano Moratorium, to protest the war in Vietnam and highlight the fact that Mexican Americans were dying in Vietnam at about twice their proportion of the U.S. population. Law enforcement began beating protesters, sparking violence that killed three people, including Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar.

1970: Twenty-three Native American activists climbed to the top of Mount Rushmore to protest the broken Treaty of Fort Laramie, which gave them the right to western South Dakota. They renamed the monument Crazy Horse Mountain and camped on top for two months.

1997: Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded an on-line business that rented digital video discs through the mail, Netflix – or, as they called it, NetFlix. The company originally charged by the disc and sent DVDs in striking red envelopes.

2005: Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 3 storm. Levees and storm walls failed, flooding and devastating an estimated 80% of New Orleans. The damage totaled about $125 billion in 2005 dollars. Sixteen years later, Category 4 Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana on the same date.

2008: Republican presidential candidate John McCain named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It was the first time a woman appeared on the GOP presidential ticket. “This is America, and every woman can walk through every door of opportunity,” she said on Sept. 3, 2008, and joked, “the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”

Friday, Aug. 28:

476: German military leader Odoacer and his forces captured and executed Orestes, the unofficial ruler of Italy and the father of last emperor of the Western Roman Empire Romulus Augustuslus. Odoacer later disposed of Augustuslus and declared himself king of Italy.

1833: The United Kingdom’s Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent after passing Parliament. Upon going into effect the following year, it freed more than 800,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean and South Africa, though most had to serve as apprentices for another four to six years. The act made Canada a free territory for enslaved people from America.

1837: Pharmacists John Lea and William Perrins of Worcester, England, began manufacturing Worcestershire sauce. According to the story, they made a batch from a recipe a Bengal governor brought back from India, thought it was harsh and forgot it in the cellar for a year or so, at which point they tasted it again and found the results delicious.

1879: King Cetshwayo, the last great king of the Zulus, was captured by the British after his defeat in the British-Zulu War. He defied British rule and became a national hero; his grave is considered sacred to this day.

1917: Ten suffragists were arrested as they picketed the White House to demand that President Woodrow Wilson support a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. The protest had started in January and drew more than 1,000 women over the course of the year. Wilson announced in January 1918 that he would support such an amendment.

1941: SS and police forces killed more than 23,000 Jews in occupied Ukraine. Soldiers marched the victims to bomb craters at Kamianets-Podilskyi and turned machine guns on them; they were either shot or smothered. It was one of the first large-scale massacres of the Holocaust.

1955: Emmett Till, 14, was kidnapped and lynched by White men in Money, Mississippi. His anguished mother insisted on an open-casket ceremony to show the world the gruesome cruelty of lynching. An all-White jury acquitted the two murder suspects after barely an hour of deliberation; they later confessed to the crime.

1963: The March on Washington took place, drawing about 200,000 peaceful protesters to the nation’s capital to advocate for equal rights for Black Americans. One of the pinnacles of the Civil Rights Movement, the day featured a performance by Mahalia Jackson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

1986: Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll, received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The star is at 1750 Vine St. in front of the Capitol Records tower.

1996: The final divorce decree ended the 15-year marriage of Charles and Diana, prince and princess of Wales. The couple had been separated for four years, and Queen Elizabeth II urged them to make the decision permanent.

2020: Actor Chadwick Boseman died of colon cancer at 43, shocking and saddening fans. His memorable and wide-ranging performances included Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, James Brown and T’Challa, the Black Panther.

Thursday, Aug. 27:

1576: Titian [Tiziano Vecellio], perhaps Venice’s greatest Renaissance painter, died of the plague. He was thought to be in his late 80s or early 90s and remained creatively productive into old age.

1859: “Colonel” Edwin L. Drake became the first person to drill a commercially successful oil well in the United States, using new techniques to drive an iron pipe 69 1? 2 feet deep. The well, in northwest Pennsylvania, produced oil for less than 20 years. Drake was a financial failure, but the state Assembly eventually gave him a pension.

1900: Army Dr. James Carroll let an infected mosquito bite him for his colleague Dr. Walter Reed’s research on the transmission of yellow fever. Carroll became severely ill, showing that mosquitoes did indeed transmit the disease. He sustained heart damage that killed him seven years later at 53.

1908: Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in a three-room house in rural central Texas. His circumstances were modest for a future president, except for his parents: His father was a struggling businessman and politician; his mother was a college-educated woman whose father was also a lawmaker.

1939: The Heinkel HE-178 airplane, with a jet engine designed by German Hans J.P. von Ohain, made the first jet-powered flight. British Royal Air Force pilot Frank Whittle had already patented a different jet-powered engine but did not perform a flight test until 1941.

1955: The Guinness Book of Records debuted. It was a bestseller by Christmas. It came about when the beer company’s managing director missed shooting a golden plover on a hunting trip, then argued that it was Europe’s fastest game bird but had no way to look up the answer.

1963: W.E.B. Du Bois died at 95. A historian, sociologist, writer and activist, he was one of the most important thinkers and leaders of Black liberation, spanning generations of change.

1967: Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, was found dead at his London home. He was 32. Examiners found he accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills mixed with alcohol. Epstein discovered the band in Liverpool and got them to clean up and perform their own songs.

1979: Militants with the Irish Republican Army bombed the boat of Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, killing him. One of his grandsons also died, as did a teenager working as crew.

1984: President Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space Program, opening space travel to private civilians for the first time. “When the shuttle lifts off, all of America will be reminded of the crucial role teachers and education play in the life of our nation,” he said.

2008: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, became the first Black person to be nominated for the presidency by a major political party. He titled his acceptance speech “The American Promise.”

2011: Hurricane Irene made landfall in the United States, hitting North Carolina and moving up the coast. It caused more than $15 billion in property damage, mostly from inland flooding. At the time, it was the most expensive Category 1 hurricane ever to hit the United States.

Wednesday, Aug. 26:

1629: English Puritan stockholders of the Massachusetts Bay Company said they would immigrate to New England if the company transferred the colony’s government there. The company agreed and appointed John Winthrop governor.

1791: The steamboat was patented — twice: The United States granted rival inventors John Fitch and James Rumsey patents for different designs. Fitch built steam-powered paddle wheel boats with scheduled trips for the public, but they were expensive and did not catch on.

1843: Charles Thurber of Connecticut was awarded a patent for the first U.S. design of a typewriter that successfully typed. He envisioned it as useful for people who were blind, “nervous” or messy writers. However, the machine was slow and was never manufactured commercially.

1883: Mount Krakatoa, an island volcano in what is now Indonesia, entered its catastrophic eruption phase. The major eruption came the next day and was heard as far away as Australia. The resulting tsunamis killed an estimated 36,000 people, and the dust affected global weather for several years afterward.

1918: Mathematician Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson was born in West Virginia. Her calculations were critical to NASA’s crewed space travel. The Black woman and her colleagues were overlooked until the publication of “Hidden Figures.”

1920: U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, making it part of the U.S. Constitution. In 1973, Congress designated Aug. 26 as Women’s Equality Day.

1957: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that his country had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. He gave no details, saying only that it could be fired “into any part of the world.” Americans were alarmed, though some doubted the test’s success.

1959: The British Motor Corp. announced the Morris Mini-Minor. Soon iconic, the Mini was a major advance in design: The compact car seated four passengers, was inexpensive and had good fuel economy.

1968: The Democratic National Convention began in Chicago — and with it, massive protests against the Vietnam War. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley called on 5,000 state National Guard members and 6,500 federal troops, according to Time, and the convention was the most violent in U.S. history.

1978: Cardinal Albino Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, was elected Pope John Paul I. Called the “smiling Pope,” he died of a heart attack 33 days later.

1986: Jerry Smith, a retired NFL tight end who had played 13 seasons for Washington, announced that he had AIDS. “I want people to know what I’ve been through and how terrible this disease is,” Smith said. “Maybe something positive will come out of this.” He died seven weeks later.

2016: As a protest, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick remained seated on the bench during the national anthem. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” he told NFL Media.

Tuesday, Aug. 25:

325: The First Council of Nicaea ended ended after affirming the divinity of Christ, stating that the Father and the Son had equal divinity and declaring the competing Arianism a heresy. It was the Christian church’s first ecumenical council.

1609: Galileo Galilei, a professor at the University of Padua, demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. His observations using the device soon convinced him to uphold and advocate Copernicus’ system, which led to house arrest.

1830: A performance of the nationalistic opera “La Muette de Portici” in Brussels set a match to proletarian anger. Some of the audience began rioting, which turned into the Belgian Revolution and secession from the Netherlands.

1916: President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, establishing the National Park Service. Before then, national parks and monuments were run by a variety of government entities, with few resources.

1925: A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Representing employees of the Pullman Company, which was the country’s largest employer of Black people, it was the first predominantly Black union.

1932: Amelia Earhart landed in Newark, New Jersey, the first woman to fly nonstop across the United States. She had taken off from Los Angeles 19 hours earlier.

1944: The Free French and U.S. Infantry liberated Paris from four years of Nazi occupation. According to bookseller Sylvia Beach, Ernest Hemingway, who was there as a war correspondent, promptly went to liberate the wine cellar at the Ritz.

1945: Chinese communists killed John Birch, a missionary turned U.S. Army intelligence officer. His death inspired the creation of the right-wing, anticommunist John Birch Society, which considered Birch the first hero of the Cold War.

1967: A sniper shot and killed George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell had picketed Martin Luther King Jr.’s marches and promoted racist and antisemitic ideas. The shooter had been his protégé but was expelled from the party for “Bolshevik leanings,” an aide said.

1989: The U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 reached Neptune, sending back the first close-up photographs of the eighth planet. It was eight years to the day after the craft got within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover. No spacecraft has visited Neptune since.

2009: The “liberal lion of the Senate,” Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, died at 77. He overcame the Chappaquiddick scandal to become influential in politics, though his own presidential dreams came to naught. He was the last surviving brother of President John F. Kennedy.

2018: Vietnam War hero, Arizona senator and GOP presidential nominee John McCain died of brain cancer at 81. Famously, he returned to the Senate to cast a crucial vote against a Republican effort to repeal parts of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act shortly after going public with his diagnosis.

2020: Kyle Rittenhouse, then 17, shot and killed two people and wounded a third during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man. Rittenhouse, who said he acted in self-defense, was acquitted on all charges.

Monday, Aug. 24:

79: Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing what is believed to be thousands. The Aug. 24 date comes from a medieval copy of a letter by Pliny the Younger. But some copies of the letter have other dates, and botanical, graffiti and other evidence point to a possible fall date for the disaster.

410: An army of Visigoths led by Alaric sacked Rome. It was the first time in 800 years that Rome had been invaded, and it came to symbolize the fall of the Western Roman Empire. “Sobs choke me. The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken,” wrote Jerome, later a saint.

1682: The Duke of York deeded William Penn the “Three Lower Counties” that make up the present state of Delaware. Penn wanted the land for Atlantic access for his colony of Pennsylvania.

1814: British troops captured Washington, DC, and set fire to several government buildings. Most notable were the Capitol and the Executive Mansion, now called the White House. What they didn’t confiscate, however, was a portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart. First lady Dolley Madison instructed 15-year-old Paul Jennings to “Save that picture, if possible,” allegedly refusing to flee until the 8-foot portrait was unscrewed from the wall; for speed, she ordered the frame broken.

1821: Spanish Viceroy Juan de O’Donojú signed the Treaty of Cordoba, granting Mexico independence from Spain. The Mexican War of Independence had started 11 years earlier.

1949: NATO entered into force following the signing of its treaty four months earlier. The founding treaty pledged that the members would “promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area” and “unite their efforts for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security.”

1950: Judge Edith Sampson became the United States’first Black representative to the United Nations. She was named as an alternate delegate. Sampson was a woman of many firsts, including being the first Black woman to be elected to the judiciary.

1968: France became the world’s fifth thermonuclear power, exploding a hydrogen bomb in a test on French Polynesia. The 2.6-megaton explosion contaminated the uninhabited atoll to such an extent that people could not set foot on the island for six years.

1981: Mark David Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for the murder of John Lennon. He pleaded guilty, saying devils told him to shoot the former Beatle and God told him to confess.

1987: Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin died at 75. A chief organizer of the March on Washington, he was often kept behind the scenes because he was gay.

1996: Four women enrolled at the Citadel, a South Carolina military college that had lost a court fight to remain all-male. One of them, Nancy Mace, later successfully ran for Congress.

2006: The International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto to a “dwarf planet.” The decision was highly controversial, with some influential scientists criticizing the definition of a planet and noting that only about 4% of the world’s astronomers attended the conference.

2011: Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, saying he could no longer meet his “duties and expectations” due to health issues. He died of cancer less than two months later.

Sunday, Aug. 23:

1305: Scottish rebel William Wallace was executed for treason in London. He denied the charge, saying he had never sworn fealty to the English king. To send a message, his head was displayed on London Bridge and his four limbs in each of four Scottish and northern English cities.

1784: Four counties seceded from western North Carolina, declaring themselves the State of Franklin. However, the Confederation Congress denied its request to be named the 14th state, and North Carolina later reasserted control. After 4 1/ 2 years, Franklin crumbled.

1856: Eunice Foote presented research to the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the speed with which the sun warmed a cylinder of carbon dioxide. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote, describing what we now call the greenhouse effect.

1864: The Union Navy captured Fort Morgan, Alabama, one of the Confederacy’s last ports on the Gulf of Mexico.

1927: Italian American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for murder. People demonstrated worldwide, declaring their innocence and protesting their sensational trial. Fifty years later, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation vindicating them.

1945: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Macario García received the Medal of Honor, becoming the first Mexican citizen to receive the U.S. military’s highest honor. The citation was for clearing two German machine gun nests, “utterly disregarding his own safety.” He became a U.S. citizen in 1947.

1966: NASA’s un-crewed Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of the Earth as seen from the moon. The “earthrise” photo was grainy and black-and-white, but still powerful.

1968: Forty-three Black soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, staged a peaceful sit-in to protest being deployed for “riot control” during the Democratic National Convention and potentially being ordered to shoot Black Chicagoans. It was one of the largest acts of civil disobedience ever recorded by U.S. soldiers.

1989: Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose agreed to a lifetime ban from baseball for betting on the game, including his own team. Rose remains the all-time hits leader. After his death in 2024, the MLB lifted the lifetime ban in May 2025.

2000: The finale of the first season of “Survivor” aired in the United States, with Richard Hatch winning. The show was credited with launching the U.S. reality competition genre.

2021: The FDA gave full approval to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. It had previously been available under an emergency use authorization. “The public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality the FDA requires,” the agency wrote.

Saturday, Aug. 22:

1485: The Wars of the Roses ended with the defeat of King Richard III by Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The Tudor dynasty lasted until Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Richard was buried nearby in an unmarked tomb that was rediscovered under a parking lot in 2012.

1864: Twelve European governments signed the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field. It declared that medical personnel were neutral and adopted the identifying sign of a red cross on white. The organization soon became known as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

1922: Irish revolutionary and politician Michael Collins was assassinated in County Cork at the age of 31. At one time the British had put 10,000 pounds on his head, but he was killed by Irishmen who opposed the peace treaty he had signed that gave Ireland dominion status, like Canada and Australia, in exchange for an oath of allegiance to the crown.

1932: The BBC began experimental TV broadcasts. The technology captured the image by beaming light through a spinning mechanical disc, unlike future TVs, and was silent.

1939: The United States granted its first patent for a pressurized aerosol spray device. Julius Seth Kahn’s “Apparatus for Mixing a Liquid with a Gas” envisioned whipped cream delivered from a glass soda bottle “through a constricted orifice.”

1950: Althea Gibson broke the color barrier in tennis, becoming the first Black player to compete at the U.S. Nationals. Gibson, who grew up in Harlem, went on to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and later became the first Black player to compete in the Ladies Professional Golf Association.

1973: President Richard Nixon announced that he was nominating Henry Kissinger as his new secretary of state. Kissinger said his goal was to solidify international successes that had been accomplished in secret.

1978: Nicaraguan rebel Sandinistas opposed to Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s government took over the country’s National Palace. They held more than 1,500 people hostage for two days and won most of their demands, including $500,000 and the return of 58 prisoners.

1989: Fashion editor Diana Vreeland died in New York City. “She was called an oracle, the high priestess of fashion, a myth maker,” the New York Times eulogized. After her magazine career, she reinvented the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute.

1992: In the second day of a standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, an FBI sniper opened fire on White separatist Randy Weaver, killing his wife, Vicki. The event became a byword in the militia movement, influencing Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

1996: Having promised to “end welfare as we know it,” President Bill Clinton signed the so-called “welfare to work” bill. Infuriating liberals, the reforms required recipients to work after two years of welfare, put a five-year lifetime limit on federal welfare benefits and encouraged two-parent families.

Friday, Aug. 21:

1831: Believing that God had chosen him to lead his people to freedom, enslaved minister Nat Turner began the deadliest slave revolt in the United States. The rebellion killed 60 people and required a 3,000-man militia to stop it. Afterward, scores of Black people who were not involved in the revolt were lynched.

1858: Illinois Senate candidates Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln began the first of seven debates. They focused largely on the extension of slavery into the central and western territories, an issue with importance far beyond Illinois. Douglas called Lincoln a dangerous radical, while Lincoln said slavery was a moral wrong.

1897: On Aug. 10, German chemist Felix Hoffmann first synthesized aspirin. On this day, he resynthesized heroin for Bayer, with the two compounds having profound, and profoundly different, effects on society.

1911: A man stole the Mona Lisa by taking it off the wall and tucking it under his clothes. The theft was discovered the next day when an amateur painter set up his easel next to where the painting was supposed to be. The painting was not recovered for two years, and the media sensation made the work famous.

1912: Arthur R. Eldred of Oceanside, New York, became the first person to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest in the organization then known as the Boy Scouts of America. In the same month, he saved two fellow Scouts from drowning. He had to wait until Sept. 2 for the physical badge to be made.

1944: Representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union began meeting at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, to lay out the principles for an organization to succeed the League of Nations. China joined the second set of conversations in September. They outlined a security council with veto power but did not figure out the specifics of voting or the status of Soviet republics.

1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Hawaii as the 50th state. He also ordered a new American flag with 50 stars in staggered rows. Approval among Hawaiians was overwhelming; not as much in the House of Representatives, where the statehood bill passed 323-89.

1970: Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, published a statement supporting the women’s and gay liberation movements as fellow revolutionaries. The move was controversial, with the party’s education minister feeling it would alienate young Black people.

1974: The Equal Educational Opportunities Act was enacted, prohibiting schools from discriminating against students based on race, color, gender or nationality. It restated that segregated schools were illegal and required schools “to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation.”

1980: Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco incorporated People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The organization undertook its first high-profile advocacy effort the following year by exposing the cruel treatment of monkeys in a Maryland research lab.

1983: Philippine opposition leader and presidential candidate Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was assassinated on the tarmac at Manila International Airport just minutes after he returned from exile.

1987: No one puts Baby in a corner! The movie “Dirty Dancing” opened in the United States.

2017: The continental United States experienced a total solar eclipse for the first time in almost 40 years.

Thursday, Aug. 20:

1619: On or about this day, '20 and odd' kidnapped Angolans arrived on a Dutch ship at the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, to be forced into servitude. It was widely regarded as the beginning of African slavery in the United States. The voyage started with 350 captives; almost all died or were kidnapped a second time by pirates.

1858: Charles Darwin co-published the first outline of a theory of evolution. Darwin developed the theory further and the following year published the landmark book 'On the Origin of Species.'

1866: The National Labor Union was founded in Baltimore and called on Congress to mandate an eight-hour workday, the first such demand. Although the group did not succeed – and folded only seven years later – it raised public awareness and birthed the American Federation of Labor.

1911: The first commercial telegram was sent around the world. The message left The New York Times building in New York City at 7 p.m. and was received 16 minutes later after traveling through 16 relays via the Azores, Gibraltar, India, Hawaii and San Francisco. It read: 'This message sent around the world.'

1940: Leon Trotsky was fatally attacked in his Mexico City home by a Spanish communist wielding an ice ax. He died the next day. The Russian Revolution leader had been living in exile for 11 years. The Soviet government said it was not responsible, though that was widely doubted.

1954: President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a National Security Council paper throwing support behind Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been appointed prime minister of Vietnam, soon South Vietnam. The goal of the support was to restore U.S. 'prestige' in Southeast Asia and 'prevent further losses to Communism.'

1960: The first live animals returned to Earth from a trip to space. The Soviet Sputnik 5 carried mutts Belka and Strelka, 40 mice and two rats. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev later sent one of Strelka’s puppies to first lady Jackie Kennedy. Though a propaganda hero, Laika, the first dog in space, had been sent on a one-way mission.

1968: Approximately 200,000 Soviet-led troops and 5,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the “Prague Spring,” the communist country’s brief period of liberalization. Protesters confronted tanks with flowers and took down street signs to confuse the soldiers, who killed more than 100 people.

1975: NASA launched the Viking 1 orbiter and lander to explore Mars. Almost one year later, it became the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars. Viking 1 remained on Chryse Planitia for six years, taking photos and the first Martian soil samples.

1982: President Ronald Reagan ordered 800 Marines to Beirut to oversee the Palestinian and Syrian withdrawal during the Lebanese Civil War. Expected to be brief, the mission ended up lasting 17 months and resulting in the deaths of 262 U.S. servicemembers.

1989: The bullet-ridden bodies of Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez were found in their Beverly Hills mansion. After seven years and three trials, a jury found their sons Lyle and Erik, sole beneficiaries of the multi-million dollar estate, guilty. In 2024, Los Angeles prosecutors announced they were reviewing new evidence of alleged sexual abuse brought forth by the brothers’ attorneys.

Wednesday, Aug. 19:

14: Augustus, né Octavian, the first Roman emperor proper, died at 75. The adopted son of Julius Caesar revived the city’s republican institutions to put a traditional front on his power while he overhauled the empire. Caesar was technically a dictator, not an emperor.

1791: Mathematician Benjamin Banneker wrote to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, condemning his hypocrisy for owning slaves. It was “pitiable,” he wrote, that the man who spoke of the equal rights God conferred on all people “should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others.”

1812: The USS Constitution defeated HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia. Witnesses said the British shot bounced off the sides as if the ship were made of iron, leading to the ship’s nickname, “Old Ironsides.”

1839: Louis Daguerre announced at the French Academy of Sciences that he had invented a device to chemically fix a “truthful likeness” of an image on a copper plate. The French government bought the rights to the daguerreotype process and released details to the public for free, though the process had been patented in England and Wales on Aug. 14.

1856: Gail Borden patented the first commercially viable process to condense milk in an anaerobic vacuum boiler.

1934: German voters approved a referendum allowing Adolf Hitler’s merger of the presidency and chancellorship by a 90% vote. It resulted in an unprecedented consolidation of power in the young republic, making Hitler for all intents and purposes a dictator. Historians say the high vote total was due to both intimidation and the fear of communism.

1936: Joseph Stalin began the Great Purge of his rivals, prominent Old Bolsheviks, as the first show trial opened. All 16 defendants were found guilty and executed.

1953: Iran’s military overthrew democratically elected Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had nationalized the country’s oil industry. The U.S. and British governments funded and helped organize the coup, which restored the Shah of Iran to power.

1991: A car driven by Yosef Lifsh struck two Black children in Brooklyn, New York, killing 7-year-old Gavin Cato. In the immediate aftermath, violence raged for multiple days between members of the Black and Hasidic Jewish communities in what is known as the Crown Heights riots, resulting in the death of Hasidic Jew Yankel Rosenbaum.

2004: Google went public. The company chose to sell shares in a public auction to make them more available to ordinary people. The initial results were disappointing: $1.67 billion, $85 a share.

2011: The “West Memphis Three” were released from prison after 18 years. As teenagers, they were convicted of murdering three 8-year-old boys, allegedly as part of Satanic rites. The release followed new DNA evidence that did not implicate them and instead tied another man to the scene.

Tuesday, Aug. 18:

1227: Genghis Khan died at 65. Born to a minor Mongol chieftain, he united tribes by force and rose to build an empire that spanned Asia. Even after his death, his troops obeyed his order to level the kingdom of Xi Xia.

1587: The first English child, Virginia Dare, was born in the Americas. She was the first granddaughter of Roanoke Island’s English Gov. John White. By her third birthday, she had disappeared with the rest of the Roanoke colonists.

1920: The 19th Amendment was ratified, giving U.S. women the vote.

1962: The Beatles performed for the first time as John, Paul, George and Ringo.

1969: The Woodstock Music and Art Fair ended in Bethel, New York. Organizer Max Yasgur told the crowd they had proven to the world 'that half a million kids can get together for fun and music and have nothing but fun and music.'

Monday, Aug. 17:

1590: John White and his sailors anchored off Roanoke Island, off what is now North Carolina, to see whether the English colonists he had left there were still alive. The following day they found only the word 'CROATOAN' carved into a tree without the agreed-upon distress signal. No one has ever unraveled the mystery; a popular theory is that the colonists joined Indigenous people on Croatoan Island.

1807: The first steamboat carrying paying passengers took its first journey, from New York City to Albany. The Clermont made the trip north in 32 hours.

1862: Deprived of land and provisions promised by the U.S. government, members of the Dakota Tribe raided a Minnesota farm for eggs, killing five settlers. Anticipating retaliation, the tribe continued to attack. The federal government quelled the uprising in September. More than 500 White people and about 190 Dakotans died.

1945: George Orwell’s 'Animal Farm' was published.

1982: Federal district Judge Jerry Buchmeyer ruled that Texas’ sodomy law violated constitutional rights to privacy and due process.

1987: Rudolf Hess, the last surviving member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, was found hanged in Spandau Prison in Berlin at the age of 93, an apparent suicide. Hess had been the only prisoner at Spandau since 1966.

Sunday, Aug. 16:

1829: Conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker arrived in Boston, having contracted with a British businessman to tour the world as a curiosity act. Their upbringing in Siam (now Thailand) gave rise to the term 'Siamese twins.'

1896: Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Charlie of the Tagish tribe found gold near Klondike River in the Yukon with George Carmack of Seattle. During the first year of the resulting gold rush, an estimated 100,000 people raced to the remote region. Less than one-third made it.

1974: The Ramones performed for the first time at the East Village dive bar CBGB, which would become the center of punk in New York.

1988: IBM introduced a suite of software for artificial intelligence.