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 At 12:01 a.m. on a Saturday morning, a voice declared "Ladies and gentlemen, roc
August 2
1990 Roughly 100,000 Iraqi troops crossed the Kuwaiti border just after midnight, and
August 3
1492 Three small ships slipped out of the harbor at Palos de la Frontera before dawn,
August 4
1914 Belgian border guards reported the first German cavalry patrols crossing near th
August 5
1963 Radioactive fallout from nuclear tests was showing up in children's milk, and th
August 6
1945 A single bomb erased a city. At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Eno
August 7
1964 Congress handed a president the power to wage war without ever declaring one. On
August 8
1588 Fire ships drifted into the Spanish fleet at midnight, and the greatest naval in
August 9
1945 Nagasaki was not even the primary target. The B-29 Bockscar, piloted by Major Ch
August 10
1846 An Englishman who never visited America left it half a million dollars in gold t
August 11
1965 A routine traffic stop on a sweltering August evening in South Los Angeles becam
August 12
August 13
1961 East German soldiers unrolled barbed wire across the heart of Berlin in the pred
August 14
1945 Emperor Hirohito's voice crackled through radio speakers across Japan at noon on
August 15
1945 Crowds erupted across the Allied world on August 15, 1945, as news spread that J
August 16
1977 Elvis Aaron Presley was found face-down on the bathroom floor of his Graceland m
August 17
1969 Four hundred thousand people descended on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New
August 18
1920 Tennessee's state legislature voted 49-47 on August 18, 1920, to ratify the Nine
August 19
1812 HMS Guerriere's masts toppled into the Atlantic like felled timber on August 19,
August 20
1968 At 11 PM on August 20, 1968, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks crossed
August 21
1959 A chain of volcanic islands 2,400 miles from the nearest continent became the ne
August 22
1485 Richard III charged directly at Henry Tudor across the muddy field at Bosworth o
August 23
1989 Approximately two million people stepped out of their homes, walked to the neare
August 24
79 A column of superheated gas and rock shot 33 kilometers into the sky above the B
August 25
1894 Kitasato Shibasaburo peered through his microscope in a makeshift Hong Kong labo
August 26
1346 French knights in full plate armor charged uphill into a storm of English arrows
August 27
1883 Four explosions ripped through the volcanic island of Krakatoa on August 27, 188
August 28
1963 Martin Luther King Jr. stepped to the podium at the Lincoln Memorial on August 2
August 29
2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, on the morning of August
August 30
1918 Fanny Kaplan pulled a Browning pistol from her handbag and fired three shots at
August 31
1997 A black Mercedes carrying Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed entered the Pont de l'Al