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
1958 The USS Nautilus shattered the Arctic's frozen ceiling on August 3, 1958, becomi
August 4
1944 German police stormed the Achterhuis on August 4, 1944, following an unidentifie
August 5
1884 France and Britain celebrate the laying of the cornerstone for the Statue of Lib
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
1969 Charles Manson's followers slaughtered Sharon Tate and four others in a brutal a
August 9
1974 Richard Nixon resigned under the weight of the Watergate scandal, making him the
August 10
1962 Stan Lee and Steve Ditko unleashed a web-slinging teenager who bled for the firs
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
1227 Genghis Khan died during the fall of Yinchuan in August 1227, leaving historians
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
1911 A Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia snatched the Mona Lisa from its wall a
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
1789 The National Constituent Assembly of France approves the Declaration of the Righ
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
1967 Thurgood Marshall took his seat on the Supreme Court, shattering a racial barrie
August 31
1997 Diana died in a car crash through the Pont de l'Alma tunnel alongside Dodi Fayed