Sacco and Vanzetti executed

On August 23, 1784, four counties in western North Carolina declare their independence as the state of Franklin. The counties lay in what would eventually become Tennessee. The previous April, the state of North Carolina had ceded its western land claims between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River to the United States Congress. The […]

On August 23, 1856, Eunice Foote’s work is presented to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Albany, New York. She is the first to articulate the possibility of global warming from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Eunice Foot was a scientist, inventor, women’s rights campaigner, wife and mother. Her […]

On August 23, 1914, in their first confrontation on European soil since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, four divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), commanded by Sir John French, struggle with the German 1st Army over the 60-foot-wide Mons Canal in Belgium, near the French frontier. The Battle of Mons was the last […]

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union sign a nonaggression pact, stunning the world, given their diametrically opposed ideologies. But the dictators were, despite appearances, both playing to their own political needs. After Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, Britain had to decide to what extent it would intervene should Hitler continue German expansion. […]

Though he had landed on the beaches of Normandy and been wounded in battle fighting with the U.S. Army, Staff Sergeant Marcario García was not yet a U.S. citizen when President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor on August 23, 1945. García became the first Mexican national to receive the American military’s […]

On the morning of August 23, 1968, a group of Black soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas stage one of the largest acts of civil disobedience ever recorded among members of the United States military. Adopting the nonviolent tactics of the civil rights movement, the soldiers stage a sit-in to protest their impending deployment to Chicago […]

On August 23, 1989, as punishment for betting on baseball, Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose accepts a settlement that includes a lifetime ban from the game. The ban is publicly announced the following morning. A heated debate continues to rage as to whether Rose, a former player who remains the game’s all-time hits leader, should […]

On August 23, 2000, Richard Hatch, a 39-year-old corporate trainer from Rhode Island, wins the season-one finale of the reality television show “Survivor” and takes home the promised $1 million prize. In a four-to-three vote by his fellow contestants, Hatch, who was known for walking around naked on the island in Borneo where the show […]

On August 23, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully approves the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people aged 16 and older, following a manufacturing review and analysis of the company’s expanded clinical trial, which included approximately 44,000 participants and found the vaccine to be 91 percent effective in preventing COVID-19.  The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was […]