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First race is held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway

Born on This Day

Orville Wright

1871 - 1948

Aviation pioneer known as the co-inventor of the first successful airplane, which he and brother Wilbur debuted in 1903.

Gene Roddenberry

1921 - 1991

Screenwriter and creator of “Star Trek,” which broke ground with is blend of science fiction and pop culture.

Matthew Perry

1969 - 2023

Actor best known for his iconic role as Chandler Bing in “Friends” and his advocacy for substance abuse recovery.

Orville WrightGetty Images

Gene RoddenberryGetty Images

Matthew PerryGetty Images for GQ

1960

AUG19

Russia launches Sputnik 5, the first spacecraft to carry animals into space and bring them back alive. Passengers include two dogs, a gray rabbit, 40 mice, two rats and 15 flasks of fruit flies.

Timeline

Also on This Day in History

Discover more of the major events, famous births, notable deaths and everything else history-making that happened on August 19th

Benjamin Banneker writes to Thomas Jefferson, urging justice for African Americans

On August 19, 1791, the accomplished American mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker pens a letter to then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson corresponds prolifically with luminaries from around the world, but Banneker is unique among them: the son of a free Black American woman and a formerly enslaved African man from Guinea, Banneker criticizes Jefferson’s […]

Old Ironsides earns its name

During the War of 1812, the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution defeats the British frigate Guerrière in a furious engagement off the coast of Nova Scotia. Witnesses claimed that the British shot merely bounced off the Constitution‘s sides, as if the ship were made of iron rather than wood. By the war’s end, “Old Ironsides” destroyed […]

John Wesley Hardin killed in Texas

John Wesley Hardin, one of the bloodiest killers of the Old West, is murdered by an off-duty policeman in a saloon in El Paso, Texas. Born in central Texas on May 26, 1853, Hardin killed his first man when he was only 15 during the violent period of post-Civil War Reconstruction. During the next 10 years, […]

President Wilson appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

On August 19, 1919, in a break with conventional practice, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson appears personally before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to argue in favor of its ratification of the Versailles Treaty, the peace settlement that ended the First World War. The previous July 8, Wilson had returned from Paris, France, where the treaty’s […]

Adolf Hitler cements his position of supreme power

On August 19, 1934, Germany holds a plebiscite vote, in which Adolf Hitler wins a 90 percent majority. Already made chancellor more than a year earlier, and unofficially made president after the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg two weeks earlier, Hitler is now officially elected the country’s president. He quickly abolishes the title […]

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Bill Clinton is born

On August 19, 1946, William Jefferson Blythe III is born in Hope, Arkansas. His father died in a car accident before he was born, and young Bill later took the last name of his stepfather, Roger Clinton. In 1992, Bill Clinton would be elected as the 42nd president of the United States. By his own […]

CIA-assisted coup overthrows government of Iran

The Iranian military, with the support and financial assistance of the United States government, overthrows the government of Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstates the Shah of Iran. Iran remained a solid Cold War ally of the United States until a revolution ended the Shah’s rule in 1979. Mosaddeq came to prominence in Iran in 1951 […]

Captured U.S. spy pilot sentenced in Russia

In the USSR, captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for his confessed espionage. On May 1, 1960, Powers took off from Pakistan at the controls of an ultra-sophisticated Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. A CIA-employed pilot, he was to fly over some 2,000 miles of Soviet territory to […]

The Beatles kick off first U.S. tour at San Francisco’s Cow Palace

On August 19, 1964, more than six months after taking the East Coast by storm, the Fab Four travel to California to take the stage at the Cow Palace in San Francisco for opening night of their first-ever concert tour of North America. The Beatles took America by storm during their famous first visit, wowing […]

A Jewish student is killed by a mob in Crown Heights, Brooklyn

Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting student from Australia, is stabbed by a mob in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. The crowd, consisting of young Black men, had been intent on seeking revenge for the death of seven-year-old Gavin Cato, who had been struck by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew three hours […]

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Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin marry

The actors Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin marry in East Hampton, New York on August 19, 1993. The Hollywood power couple reportedly became involved on the set of the romantic comedy The Marrying Man (1991), in which they played lovers. The film was a box-office flop, as was a second film the pair made together, The Getaway […]

“West Memphis Three” released from prison after 18 years

On August 19, 2011, three men, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, who were convicted as teenagers in 1994 of the murders of three boys in Arkansas, are released from prison in a special legal deal allowing them to maintain their innocence while acknowledging that prosecutors had sufficient evidence to convict them. Echols, 36, […]

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