1814 – The British Burn Down Washington, British troops under the leadership of Major General Robert Ross occupied Washington D.C. and burnt down the city, including the Presidential Mansion and the Capitol building. President Madison and members of his government fled the city and took refuge in Brookeville, Maryland. The British had occupied the city for only 24 hours when a massive storm forced the troops to retreat, following which the Americans regained control of the capital.
49 BC – Julius Caesar’s general Gaius Scribonius Curio is defeated in the Second Battle of the Bagradas River by the Numidians under Publius Attius Varus and King Juba of Numidia. Curio commits suicide to avoid capture.
0079 – Believed until 2018 to be the date of the massive eruption of Mt. Vesuvius which buried the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae, killing untold thousands. Latest evidence suggests the eruption occurred after 17 October.
0410 – The Visigoths overran Rome. This event symbolized the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
1215 – Pope Innocent III declares the Magna Carta invalid
1349 – 6,000 Jews, blamed for the Plague, are killed in Mainz
1349 – Jews of Cologne Germany set themselves on fire to avoid baptism
1391 – Jews of Palma, Mallorca, massacred
1456 – The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.
1572 – St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre – The Catholics began their slaughter of the French Protestants in Paris. The killings claimed about 70,000 people.
1662 – Act of Uniformity requires English to accept Book of Common Prayer
1682 – Duke James of York gives Delaware to William Penn
1751 – Thomas Colley executed in England for drowning a supposed witch
1814 – The British Burn Down Washington, British troops under the leadership of Major General Robert Ross occupied Washington D.C. and burnt down the city, including the Presidential Mansion and the Capitol building. President Madison and members of his government fled the city and took refuge in Brookeville, Maryland. The British had occupied the city for only 24 hours when a massive storm forced the troops to retreat, following which the Americans regained control of the capital.
1816 – The Treaty of St. Louis is signed by the USA and the united tribes of Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi in St. Louis, Missouri.
1857 – The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history.
1858 – Richmond “Daily Dispatch” reports 90 blacks arrested for learning
1891 – Thomas Edison applied patents for the kinetoscope and kinetograph (U.S. Pats. 493,426 and 589,168).
1912 – District of Alaska becomes an organized incorporated territory of the United States
1912 – US passes Anti-gag law, federal employees right to petition government
1929 – Palestinians attack orthodox Jews in Jerusalem
1936 – FDR gives the FBI the authority to pursue fascists and communists
1949 – The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) went into effect. The agreement was that an attack against on one of the parties would be considered “an attack against them all.”
1954 – The Communist Party was virtually outlawed in the U.S. when the Communist Control Act went into effect.
1959 – Three days after Hawaiian statehood, Hiram L. Fong was sworn in as the first Chinese-American U.S. senator while Daniel K. Inouye was sworn in as the first Japanese-American U.S. representative.
1968 – France became the 5th thermonuclear power when they exploded a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific.
1968 – Northern Ireland’s first civil rights march held; many more marches would be held over the following year and Loyalists organized counter-demonstrations to get the marches banned
1970 – Bomb kills 1 at U of Wisconsin’s Army Math Research Center in Madison
1979 – NFL fans (60,916) choose old Patriots logo over new
1981 – Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 yrs to life for John Lennon’s murder
1985 – 27 anti-apartheid leaders were arrested in South Africa as racial violence rocked the country.
1989 – Pete Rose, the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, was banned from baseball for life after being accused of gambling on baseball.
1989 – “Total war” was declared by Columbian drug lords on their government.
1989 – The U.S. space probe, Voyager 2, sent back photographs of Neptune.
1990 – Iraqi troops surrounded foreign missions in Kuwait.
1991 – Ukraine gains its independence, The Eastern European country gained independence from the Soviet Union after a failed coup to remove Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. The country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine and put the decision out to the public as a referendum. August 24 is celebrated each year as Independence Day in Ukraine.
1991 – Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the head of the Communist Party.
1992 – China and South Korea established diplomatic relations.
1994 – Israel & PLO initialed accord giving autonomy to Palestinians in West Bank in education, health, taxation, social welfare & tourism
1998 – U.S. officials cited a soil sample as part of the evidence that a Sudan plant was producing precursors to the VX nerve gas. And, therefore made it a target for U.S. missiles on August 20, 1998.
1998 – A donation of 24 beads was made, from three parties, to the Indian Museum of North America at the Crazy Horse Memorial. The beads are said to be those that were used in 1626 to buy Manhattan from the Indians.
2001 – In McAllen, TX, Bridgestone/Firestone agreed to settle out of court and pay a reported $7.5 million to a family in a rollover accident in their Ford Explorer.
2001 – The remains of nine American servicemen killed in the Korean War were returned to the U.S. The bodies were found about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It was estimated that it would be a year before the identities of the soldiers would be known.
2004 – 89 passengers die after two airliners explode after flying out of Domodedovo International Airport, near Moscow. The explosions were caused by suicide bombers (reportedly female) from the Russian Republic of Chechnya.
2006 – The planet Pluto was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Pluto’s status was changed due to the IAU’s new rules for an object qualifying as a planet. Pluto met two of the three rules because it orbits the sun and is large enough to assume a nearly round shape. However, since Pluto has an oblong orbit and overlaps the orbit of Neptune it disqualified Pluto as a planet.
2012 – A US jury in California finds that Samsung is guilty of patent infringement and awards over US$1 billion in damages to Apple meanwhile in a South Korea court both are found guilty of patent infringement
2014 – Nurse William Pooley flies back to the UK for emergency treatment after contracting Ebola virus after attempting to treat patients in Sierra Leone
2018 – Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler sends cease-and-desist letter to President Trump demanding he stop using the band’s songs at rallies
2019 – US adventurer Victor Vescovo is the first person to visit the deepest point of every ocean when he reaches Molloy Hole, in the Arctic
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
