History by month
August
31 days of history. Every date is an entry point to the events, births, and moments that shaped our world.
August 1
1981 MTV ignited a cultural shift by launching with John Lack's "Ladies and gentlemen
August 2
1990 Iraqi commandos infiltrated the border at dawn to pave the way for a two-pronged
August 3
1492 Christopher Columbus departs Palos de la Frontera with three ships, launching a
August 4
1914 Germany's invasion of Belgium forces Britain to declare war on Berlin while the
August 5
1963 Rising fears over radioactive fallout from massive hydrogen and thermonuclear te
August 6
1945 The Enola Gay dropped Little Boy over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m., detonating 1,900 f
August 7
1964 The U.S. Congress hands President Lyndon B. Johnson sweeping authority to escala
August 8
1588 The English fleet's fire ships scatter the Spanish Armada at Gravelines, sending
August 9
1945 A cloud-shrouded Kokura forced Major Charles Sweeney to divert Bockscar to Nagas
August 10
1846 President James K. Polk signed legislation on August 10, 1846, establishing the
August 11
1965 Watts erupted into six days of violent unrest after police arrested a young Blac
August 12
August 13
1961 Walter Ulbricht publicly denied any plan to build a wall just weeks before order
August 14
1945 Representatives from eleven nations signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender
August 15
1945 Emperor Hirohito broadcast Japan's unconditional surrender to a nation that had
August 16
1977 Elvis Presley's 1956 hit "Heartbreak Hotel" catapulted him to stardom and cement
August 17
1969 Jimi Hendrix twisted "The Star Spangled Banner" into a screaming, feedback-drenc
August 18
1920 Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, clearing the
August 19
1812 The American frigate USS Constitution shatters the hull of the British frigate H
August 20
1968 Two hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks rolled into Czechoslovak
August 21
1959 Congress passed the Hawaii Admission Act in March 1959, ending decades of planta
August 22
1485 Henry Tudor's decisive victory at Bosworth Field toppled Richard III and extingu
August 23
1989 Two million people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania linked hands across 600 k
August 24
79 Mount Vesuvius unleashed a pyroclastic surge that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum
August 25
1894 Kitasato Shibasaburō isolates the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague and s
August 26
1346 English archers unleash a hail of arrows that shatters the charge of French armo
August 27
1883 Four colossal explosions at Krakatoa shattered eardrums on ships forty miles awa
August 28
1963 Hundreds of thousands of Americans flooded Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, d
August 29
2005 Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast with a Category 3 landfall that trig
August 30
1918 Fanya Kaplan fired three shots from a Browning pistol at Lenin as he left a Mosc
August 31
1997 Diana died in a car crash through the Pont de l'Alma tunnel alongside Dodi Fayed