Viking 1 launched to Mars

Some 20 Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists. The arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World marks a beginning of two and a half centuries of slavery in North America.

Sergeant Charles Floyd dies three months into the voyage of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, becoming the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die during the journey. Lewis and Clark left St. Louis the previous May, heading up the Missouri River with a party of 35 men, called the Corps of Discovery. Among […]

New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley publishes a passionate editorial calling on President Abraham Lincoln to declare emancipation for all enslaved people in Union-held territory. Greeley’s blistering words voiced the impatience of many Northern abolitionists; but unbeknownst to Greeley and the public, Lincoln was already moving in the direction of emancipation. In 1841, Greeley launched the […]

On August 20, 1918, Jacqueline Susann, the author of Valley of the Dolls, the 1966 mega-hit novel about the showbiz lives of three women (reportedly modeled in part after Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly), is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Like her characters in Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann moved to New York […]

Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded by an ice-ax-wielding assassin at his compound outside Mexico City. The killer—Ramón Mercader—was a Spanish communist and probable agent of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Trotsky died from his wounds the next day. Born in the Ukraine of Russian-Jewish parents in 1879, Trotsky embraced Marxism as a teenager […]

On August 20, 1945, 11 days after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, Brooklyn Dodgers utility player Tommy Brown homers to drive in his team’s only run in an 11-1 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates. It seems insignificant, aside from the fact that, at 17 years old, Brown remains the youngest player to homer in a Major […]

On the night of August 20, 1968, approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”—a brief period of liberalization in the communist country. Czechoslovakians protested the invasion with public demonstrations and other non-violent tactics, but they were no match for the Soviet tanks. The liberal reforms of First […]

Lyle and Erik Menendez shoot their parents, Jose and Kitty.