917: A Byzantine counter-offensive is routed by Syeon at Anchialus, Bulgaria.
1153: Death of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, at 9
1191: Richard I, King of England, commands the execution of 2500 Muslim prisoners beneath the walls of Acre
1205: Henry crowned Emperor of Rumania
1384: Gerhard Groote, founder of Brethren of the Common Life dies
1517: Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, cardinal and viceroy of Naples (1571-75) born
1526: Church historian and humanist Peter Opmeer, (Historia Martyrum) born
1561: The composer and singer Jacopo Peri. born
1591: Robert Herrick born
1597: First Dutch East India Company ships return from the Far East
1611: Palestrina's contemporary Tomas Luis de Victoria died in Madrid at the age of 62
1612: Execution of the Lancashire Witches
1619: The first group of twenty Africans is brought to Jamestown, Virginia.
1625: French playwright Thomas Corneille born
1636: Roger Williams draws up covenant for Providence Plantations
1667: John Milton publishes Paradise Lost, an epic poem about the fall of Adam and Eve.
1702: Russian general-fieldmarshal Stepan F graaf Apraksin born
1710: English mathematician Thomas Simpson(rules of Simpson) born
1720: Composer Bernard de Bury born
1741: Danish navigator Vitus Jonas Bering discovered what is now Alaska.
1745: Francis Asbury born
1756: Composer Bernardo Bitton born
1785: Oliver Hazard Perry US Naval hero ("We have met the enemy") born
1794: American General "Mad Anthony" Wayne defeats the Ohio Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the Northwest territory, ending Indian resistance in the area.
1833: Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president of the United States in North Bend, Ohio. born
1847: General Winfield Scott wins the battle of Churubusco on his drive to Mexico City. The Mexican War gave future civil war generals their first taste of combat.
1866: President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, even though the fighting had stopped months earlier.
1866: The National Labor Union advocated an eight hour workday. Industry, however, did not heed the request. Workers commonly worked 10 or 12 hour days -- or more.
1881: Poet Edgar Guest born
1882: The "1812" Overture was first performed on the occasion of the dedication of the Cathedral of the Redeemer in the Kremlin. The "1812" turned out to be a piece of such vigor that it became one of the most popular of all classics.
1886: Paul Tillich, theologian and philosopher who wrote Systematic Theology born
1890: Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (The Color out of Space) born
1907: Actress Shirley Booth (Hazel, A Touch of Grace) born
1914: German forces occupied Brussels, Belgium, during World War One.
1918: Britain opened its offensive on the Western front during World War One.
1920: Pioneering American radio station EightMK in Detroit (later WWJ) began daily broadcasting.
1921: Author Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) born
1923: The first American dirigible, the Shenandoah, was launched at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on this day.
1931: Boxing promoter Don King (shocking hairstyle) born
1935: Country singer Justin Tubb born
1939: Tarzan got married. Johnny Weissmuller married Beryl Scott.
1939: Orrin Tucker's Orchestra recorded Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny,Oh!, on Columbia Records.
1940: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force, saying, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
1940: Exiled Russian Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico City, with an ice pick to the back of the head, by one of Stalin's hired assassins (Frank Jackson).
1941: Adolf Hitler authorizes the development of the V-2 missile.
1942: Singer-musician Isaac Hayes born
1944: Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi born
1946: Former CBS anchorwoman Connie Chung born
1947: Musician Jimmy Pankow (Chicago) born
1948: Rock singer Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin) born
1949: Cleveland's Indians and Chicago's White Sox played at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland before the largest crowd to see a nighttime major-league baseball game: 78,382.
1952: Country singer Rudy Gatlin born
1952: Singer-songwriter John Hiatt born
1953: Actor-director Peter Horton born
1953: The Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
1954: "Today" show weatherman Al Roker born
1955: Actor Jay Acovone born
1955: Hundreds of people were killed in anti-French rioting in Morocco and Algeria.
1956: Actress Joan Allen born
1964: President Johnson signed a nearly $1 billion anti-poverty measure.
1965: Rapper KRS-One born
1968: The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations began invading Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek's regime.
1971: Actor Jonathan Ke Quan ("Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom") born
1971: The Cambodian military launches a series of operations against the Khmer Rouge. As the war in Vietnam wound down with the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the war in neighboring Cambodia was going from bad to worse.
1975: Rock singer Monique Powell (Save Ferris) born
1977: The US launched "Voyager Two," an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature.
1982: President Reagan announced that a contingent of U.S. Marines would join French and Italian troops as peace-keepers in Beirut.
1983: The Commerce Department announced it was lifting export license requirements for the sale of heavy-duty pipe-laying equipment to the Soviet Union, a move that had been approved the day before by President Reagan.
1984: Republicans opened their 33rd national convention in Dallas as they prepared to nominate President Reagan and Vice President George Bush for a second term in office.
1985: The machine that revolutionized the world's offices, the original Xerox 914 copier, was formally presented to the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History. The invention of Chester Carlson, it was introduced to the world in March 196
1986: Postal employee Patrick Henry Sherrill went on a rampage at a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, shooting 14 fellow workers to death before killing himself.
1986: The U.S. Census Bureau reported the nation's population at 240,468,000 and the median age had reached an all-time high of 31 years.
1987: A federal appeals court in Washington rejected Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North's argument that the independent counsel investigating the Iran-Contra affair was operating under an invalid Justice Department regulation.
1988: Eight British soldiers were killed by an Irish Republican Army land mine that destroyed a military bus near Omagh, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland.
1989: Video executive Jose Menendez and his wife, Kitty, were shot to death in their Beverly Hills, Calif., mansion by their sons, Lyle and Erik. The brothers' first murder trials ended in hung juries; they face re-trial.
1989: British conservationist George Adamson, 83, was shot and killed by bandits in Kenya.
1989: 51 people died when a pleasure boat sank in the Thames River in London.
1990: Ending administration resistance to the term, President Bush declared that Americans and other foreigners held by Iraq are "hostages" and warned that he would hold Iraq responsible for their "safety and well-being."
1991: More than 100,000 people rallied outside the Russian parliament building as protests against the Soviet coup increased. President Bush said he would never deal with the coup leaders.
1992: The early hours of August 20th, the Republican national convention in Houston renominated President Bush and Vice President Quayle. On the evening of the 20th, Bush delivered a hard-hitting speech in which he attacked the Democrats and promised to seek across-the-board tax cuts if re-elected.
1993: Conjoined twins Angela and Amy Lakeberg were separated at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in an operation that sacrificed Amy, since the sisters shared a common heart and liver tissue. (Although the separation appeared to be successful, Angela died in June 1994.)
1994: Benjamin Chavis Jr. was fired as head of the NAACP after a turbulent 16-month tenure.
1995: In northern India, 348 people were killed when a passenger train rammed another that had stopped on the tracks after hitting a cow.
1995: The remnants of an American peace delegation headed home from Bosnia-Herzegovina with the bodies of three diplomats killed in an accident.
1996: President Clinton approved the first minimum-wage increase in five years, raising the hourly minimum by 90 cents to $5.15 per hour over 13 months.
1996: Susan McDougal was sentenced in Little Rock, Arkansas, to two years in prison in a Whitewater fraud case.
1997: United Parcel Service drivers put away their picket signs, put on their brown shirts and shorts, and called on customers again as the delivery giant began to sluggishly recover from its costly strike.
1998: Retaliating 13 days after the deadly embassy bombings in East Africa, US forces launched cruise missile strikes against alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan and what was described as a chemical plant in Sudan.
1998: Monica Lewinsky went before a grand jury for a second round of explicit testimony about her White House trysts with President Clinton.
1999: The CIA pulled the security clearances for former Director John Deutch for keeping secret files on an unsecured home computer.
1999: Three Japanese banks announced a broad alliance plan that would create the world's largest banking group with assets of well over $1 trillion.
