Category: Today

On August 11, 1972, the last of American ground combat troops exited South Vietnam.

On August 10, 1809, Ecuadorians attempted independence from Spain with the Declaration of Independence of Quito, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators a few days less than a year later.

Independence was finally achieved in 1822.

On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.

In 1999 on this 221st day of the year, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.

Francis Hutcheson, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume and Adam Smith, was born in Ireland on August 8, 1694. He died on his birthday in 1746.

On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”

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Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.

On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain, a little less than two years and three months before Kamala Harris, the most famous Jamaican-American, was born.

On August 5, 1884, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty.

One hundred years later, New York’s Masons put up a commemorative plaque that read, in part:

At this site on August 5, 1884, the cornerstone of the pedestal of the Statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” was laid with ceremony by William A. Brodie, Grand Master of Masons in the State of New York. Grand lodge members, representatives of the United States and French governments, Army and Navy officers, members of foreign legations, and distinguished citizens were present. This plaque is dedicated by the Masons of New York in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of that historic event.

The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.

On August 4, 1701, the Great Peace of Montreal was signed. The dispute was between the French and their native allies, on the one side, and the Iroquois Confederacy on the other. Well over a thousand representatives of forty nations from the Great Lakes to the Maritimes and from southern Illinois to James Bay gathered to meet the French at Montreal. Month-long ceremonies concluded with the signing of the treaty, putting an end to the Iroquois Wars.

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, testifying under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee, accused United Nations bigwig Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.  

Fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress of the United States signed the Declaration of Independence. The signing began on August 2, 1776, and continued for several months, not all the delegates being present at the initial signing. The signings occurred at the Pennsylvania State House — later called Independence Hall — in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.