Aug. 14
1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, ensuring income for elderly Americans and creating a federal unemployment insurance program.
1945: President Harry S. Truman announced that Imperial Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.
1947: Pakistan gained independence from British rule.
1994: Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” was captured by French agents in Sudan.
Aug. 15
1057: Macbeth, King of Scots, was killed in battle by Malcolm, the eldest son of King Duncan, whom Macbeth had slain.
1935: Humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post were killed when their airplane crashed in the Alaska Territory.
1947: India gained independence after nearly 200 years of British rule.
1969: The Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened in upstate New York; more than 460,000 people attended the three-day festival.
Aug. 16
1977: Elvis Presley died at his Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee at the age of 42.
2018: Singer Aretha Franklin, known as the “Queen of Soul,” died in Detroit at the age of 76.
1777: American forces won the Battle of Bennington in what was considered a turning point of the Revolutionary War.
1948: Baseball legend Babe Ruth died in New York at age 53.
Aug. 17
1807: Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat made its first voyage, heading up the Hudson River on a successful round trip between New York City and Albany.
1863: Federal batteries and ships began bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor during the Civil War.
1945: George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm,” an allegorical satire of Soviet Communism, was first published.
1959: Trumpeter Miles Davis released “Kind of Blue,” regarded as one of the most influential jazz albums of all time.
Aug. 18
1590: John White, governor of the Roanoke Island colony in present-day North Carolina, returned after three years to find it deserted; the fate of the “Lost Colony” remains a mystery.
1914: President Woodrow Wilson issued his Proclamation of Neutrality, aimed at keeping the United States out of World War I.
1920: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing American women’s right to vote, was ratified as Tennessee became the 36th state to approve it.
1963: James Meredith became the first Black student to graduate from the University of Mississippi
Aug. 19
1692: Four men and one woman were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony; John Proctor’s story later inspired Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”
1812: The USS Constitution defeated the British frigate HMS Guerriere off Nova Scotia during the War of 1812: Earning the nickname “Old Ironsides.”
1854: 31 U.S. soldiers were killed after one of the soldiers fatally shot Brule Lakota Chief Conquering Bear, sparking the First Sioux War.
Aug. 20
1858: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was first published, in the “Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society”.
1866: President Andrew Johnson declared the official end of the Civil War.
1882: Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” had its premiere in Moscow.
1940: Exiled communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked in Mexico by assassin Ramon Mercader; he died the next day.
