On August 12, 30 BC, Queen Cleopatra VII committed suicide, ending the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt and providing grist for literary works such as Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra.
On this day in 1898, an Armistice ended the Spanish-American War, a war commemorated best by sociologist and economist William Graham Sumner in his classic essay “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”