Category: Today

On August 14, 1765, Sam Adams led the first rebel mob against enforcers of the Stamp Act in Britain’s American colonies.

On this day in 1980, Lech Wałęsa led strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland, shipyards.

On August 13, 1831, Nat Turner witnessed a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God. Eight days later he and 70 other slaves killed approximately 55 whites in Southampton County, Virginia.

On August 12, 1944, French forces under General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque liberated Alençon from Nazi rule — the first city in World War II France to be rescued by the French themselves.

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.

Followers of Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement against the British rule on August 8, 1942.

On the same day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

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.”

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.

In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.

On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.

The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.

President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.