WikiPedia:Selected anniversaries/August

• 1774 - The element oxygen was independently discovered by Joseph Priestley, corroborating the prior discovery by Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
• 1798 - During the French Revolutionary Wars the Battle of the Nile started between French and British fleets.
• 1927 - People's Liberation Army was established in China.
• 1944 - The Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation began in Poland.

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• 216 BC - Hannibal destroyed a Roman army at the Battle of Cannae.
• 1870 - Tower Subway, the world's first underground tube railway, opened in London.
• 1934 - Adolf Hitler became F�hrer of Nazi Germany.
• 1945 - The Allies' Potsdam Conference determined the future of the defeated Germany, and the terms for Japan.
• 1990 - Iraq invaded Kuwait, triggering the Gulf War.

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• 1645 - France and the Holy Roman Empire fought in the Second Battle of N�rdlingen.
• 1916 - Sir Roger Casement was hanged for his part in the Easter Rising in Ireland.
• 1923 - Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated as the 30th President of the United States.
• 1948 - Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.

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• 1578 - Moroccan forces defeated Portuguese troops in the Battle of Alcazarquivir.
• 1790 - A newly passed tariff act created the Revenue Cutter Service.
• 1944 - Holocaust: The Gestapo found Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family.
• 1964 - Gulf of Tonkin Incident: Two U.S. Navy destroyers were reportedly attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.
• 1983 - Thomas Sankara became President of Upper Volta.

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• 1305 - William Wallace, leader of the Scottish resistance against England, was captured near Glasgow and transported to London for trial and execution.
• 1858 - Cyrus West Field and colleagues completed the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
• 1861 - The United States government issued its first income tax: 3% of all incomes over US $800 (later rescinded in 1872).
• 1914 - The first electric traffic light was installed in Cleveland, Ohio.

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• 1806 - Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor abdicated to become Francis I, Emperor of Austria, thus ending the Holy Roman Empire.
• 1945 - United States perform atomic bombing on Hiroshima, in Japan, killing 80,000.
• 1991 - Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for a "World Wide Web."
• 2001 - U.S. President George W. Bush received a daily briefing warning of an imminent attack by Osama bin Laden.

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• 1679 - The brigantine Le Griffon became the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes.
• 1794 - Farmers in Pennsylvania rebeled against federal taxes on liquor, starting the Whiskey Rebellion.
• 1927 - The Peace Bridge opened between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.
• 1947 - Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft, landed at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands.

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• 1585 - John Davis entered Cumberland Sound in quest for the Northwest Passage.
• 1876 - Thomas Edison received a patent for his mimeograph machine.
• 1929 - The German airship Graf Zeppelin embarked on a flight to circumnavigate the world.
• 1938 - Holocaust: The Mauthausen concentration camp was opened.

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• 378 - A large Roman army led by Emperor Valens was destroyed by the Visigoths in the Battle of Adrianople.
• 1173 - The construction of the campanile, or bell tower, for the Italian city of Pisa's cathedral, began. The campanile would eventually become the Tower of Pisa
• 1945 - The atomic bomb Fat Man was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan.
• 1974 - Richard Nixon became the first U.S. President to resign from office, due to his role in the Watergate scandal.

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• 1492 - Rodrigo Borgia was elected pope and took the name Pope Alexander VI.
• 1792 - French Revolution insurrectionists stormed the Tuileries Palace.
• 1913 - Delegates signed the Treaty of Bucharest, ending the Second Balkan War.
• 1990 - The Magellan space probe reached Venus.

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• 3114 BC - beginning of our current era in the Maya Long Count Calendar
• 480 BC - Persians under Xerxes defeated Spartans under King Leonidas I in the Battle of Thermopylae. The Spartans fought to the last man.
• 1919 - The constitution of the Weimar Republic was adopted.
• 1965 - Watts Riots started six days of rioting in Los Angeles, California.
• 1970 - A trademark application for the word Spork was published by the USPTO.
• 2003 - NATO took over command of the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, marking its first major operation outside Europe in its 54-year-history.

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• 1851 - Isaac Singer was granted a patent for his sewing machine.
• 1953 - History of nuclear weapons: The Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb.
• 1981 - IBM introduced its PC (personal computer).
• 1990 - A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil was discovered in South Dakota.
• 2000 - The Russian submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea.

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• 1521 - Tenochtitl�n (present day Mexico City) falls to conquistador Hern�n Cort�s.
• 1704 - The Battle of Blenheim, a pivotal event of the War of the Spanish Succession, takes place. England and Austria claim victory over France and Bavaria.
• 1920 - The Battle of Warsaw begins during the Polish-Soviet War.
• 1961 - East Germany Soviets commence building the Berlin Wall to frustrate attempts of escape through Iron Curtain.

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• 1385 - Castilians were defeated by Portuguese at the Battle of Aljubarrota.
• 1842 - Seminole Indians were forced from Florida to Oklahoma, ending the Second Seminole War.
• 1941 - Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter.
• 1980 - Lech Wałęsa and colleagues at shipyards began strike actions, which later led to the founding of the Solidarity movement in Gdańsk, Poland.

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• 1914 - The Panama Canal opened to traffic, providing a short-cut from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
• 1920 - Battle of Warsaw, the Red Army march towards Western Europe stopped by the Polish troops under J�zef Piłsudski
• 1945 - Japan accepted the terms of surrender to the United States, ending World War II.
• 1947 - Jawaharlal Nehru took office as the first Prime Minister of India.
• 1969 - The Woodstock Music and Art Festival in Bethel, New York began.

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• 1777 - British forces were defeated by American troops in the Battle of Bennington.
• 1819 - Peterloo massacre occurred at a public meeting at St. Peter's Field in Manchester, England.
• 1954 - Volume 1, Issue 1 of Sports Illustrated was published.
• 1960 - Joseph Kittinger parachuted from a balloon over New Mexico at 102,800 feet (31,330 m), setting records for; high-altitude jump, free-fall height, and fastest speed by a human without an aircraft.
• 1962 - The Beatles fired Pete Best and replaced him with Ringo Starr.

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• 1807 - Robert Fulton's first American steamboat left New York City for Albany, New York on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
• 1962 - East German border guards killed 18-year-old Peter Fechter as he attempted to cross the Berlin Wall into West Berlin.
• 1969 - Category 5 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage (1969 dollars).
• 1988 - Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was killed in a plane crash.
• 1998 - Monica Lewinsky scandal: U.S. President Bill Clinton admitted in taped testimony that he had an "improper physical relationship" with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

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• 293 BC - Oldest known Roman temple to Venus was founded, starting the institution of Vinalia Rustica.
• 1590 - John White, the governor of the Colony of Roanoke, returned from a supply-trip to England and found his settlement deserted.
• 1877 - Asaph Hall discovered Mars's largest moon, Phobos.
• 1903 - German inventor Karl Jatho flew with his self-made motored gliding airplane, four months before the first flight of the Wright Brothers.
• 1963 - James Meredith became the first African American to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

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• 1848 - California Gold Rush: The New York Herald reported news to the East Coast of the United States that a gold rush was on in California.
• 1929 - The radio comedy show Amos & Andy made its debut.
• 1942 - Allied forces raided Dieppe, France in the Dieppe Raid.
• 1953 - CIA operatives and money helped overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and reinstated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
• 1991 - Mikhail Gorbachev was announced as "ill and had been relieved of his state post as President" in a failed Soviet coup attempt.

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• 636 - Arab forces led by Khalid bin Walid took control of Syria and Palestine in the Battle of Yarmuk, marking the first great wave of Muslim conquests and the rapid advance of Islam outside Arabia.
• 917 - Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria invaded Thrace and drove the Byzantines out.
• 1882 - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" debuted in Moscow.
• 1968 - 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to end the "Prague Spring" of political liberalization.
• 1991 - Estonia regained its independence in the Singing Revolution as part of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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• 1680 - Pueblo Indians captured Santa Fe from the Spanish.
• 1772 - A coup led by Gustav III was completed by adopting a new Instrument of Government, ending the Age of Liberty in Sweden.
• 1831 - Nat Turner led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia.
• 1959 - Hawaii was admitted as the 50th U.S. state.
• 1986 - Toxic gas erupted from volcanic Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing over 1700 people.

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Mona Lisa

• 1485 - The Battle of Bosworth Field decisively ended the Wars of the Roses.
• 1851 - The first America's Cup was won by the yacht America.
• 1864 - Twelve European nations signed the First Geneva Convention, which marked the beginning of the Red Cross movement led by Henry Dunant.
• 1911 - The theft of the Mona Lisa was discovered.
• 1989 - Nolan Ryan struck out Rickey Henderson, becoming the first major league baseball pitcher to record 5000 strikeouts.

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• 1833 - Slavery was abolished in the British colonies.
• 1866 - The Austro-Prussian War ended with the Treaty of Prague.
• 1927 - Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.
• 1944 - King Michael of Romania dismissed the pro-Nazi government of General Ion Antonescu.
• 1966 - NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of Earth from the distance of the Moon

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• 79 - Mount Vesuvius erupted. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae were buried in volcanic ash.
• 1572 - St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre: a massacre of Huguenots began. An estimated 70,000 people were killed in France in the following weeks.
• 1814 - Washington, DC was burnt down during the War of 1812. The walls of the White House were subsequently painted white to cover the smoke damage.
• 1995 - Windows 95 became available.
• 2003 - US Spacecraft Voyager 2 was 71 astronomical units distant from Earth and is escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.3 AU per year (ca. 15 km/s). It will be approximately 40,000 years before Voyager 2 approaches another planetary system.

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• 1835 - The New York Sun perpetrated the Great Moon Hoax.
• 1912 - The Kuomintang was founded in China.
• 1920 - In the Polish-Soviet War, the Battle of Warsaw ended with a Russian defeat.
• 1944 - Paris was liberated by the Allies during World War II.
• 1980 - Microsoft announced their version of UNIX, Xenix

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• 1071 - The Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Manzikert, which marked the decline of Byzantine fortunes
• 1789 - French revolution: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was approved by Constituent Assembly at Versailles
• 1839 - The slave-held Amistad landed off Long Island.
• 1883 - Volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia generated disastrous tsunami waves, destroying many settlements on Java and Sumatra, and killing 36,000 people.
• 1968 - The Beatles' "Hey Jude" was released as a single in the United States

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Mars

• 1776 - British forces under General William Howe defeated Americans under General George Washington in the Battle of Long Island.
• 1962 - Mariner 2 was launched toward Venus.
• 1928 - Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war, was signed by sixty nations.
• 1990 - The BBC launched BBC Radio Five Live.
• 2003 - Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years.

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• 1565 - St. Augustine was established as a city in Spanish Florida.
• 1845 - Scientific American magazine published its first issue.
• 1850 - Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin premiered.
• 1963 - Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.
• 1996 - Britain's Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales were divorced.

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• 1526 - Suleiman the Magnificent defeated and killed the last Jagiellonian king of Hungary and Bohemia at the Battle of Moh�cs.
• 1786 - Small farmers, disgruntled by over high debt and tax burdens, started Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts
• 1907 - The Quebec Bridge collapsed during construction, killing 75 workers.
• 1958 - United States Air Force Academy opened in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
• 1982 - Meitnerium, an artificial chemical element with the atomic number 109, was first synthesized in Germany.

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• 1574 - Guru Ram Das became the Fourth Sikh Guru/Master.
• 1800 - Gabriel Prosser attempted a slave insurrection in Virginia.
• 1813 - French forces were defeated by an Austrian-Prussian-Russian alliance in the Battle of Kulm.
• 1863 - American Civil War: Union forces were defeated in the Second Battle of Bull Run.
• 1992 - Michael Schumacher wins his first Formula One race at the Belgian Grand Prix.
• 1999 - East Timorese voted for independence in a referendum.

• 1888 - Jack the Ripper claimed his first victim.
• 1920 - First radio news program broadcast in Detroit, Michigan.
• 1992 - Pascal Lissouba was inaugurated as the President of the Republic of the Congo after a multi-party presidential election, ending a long history of one-party Marxist rule.
• 1997 - Diana, Princess of Wales died in a Paris car crash.

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