Hitler suspends euthanasia program

After centuries of dormancy, Mount Vesuvius erupts in A.D. 79, devastating the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing thousands.

On August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812 between the United States and England, British troops enter Washington, D.C. and burn the White House in retaliation for the American attack on the city of York in Ontario, Canada, in June 1813. When the British arrived at the White House, they found that President James […]

Eleven years after the outbreak of the Mexican War of Independence, Spanish Viceroy Juan de O’Donojú signs the Treaty of Córdoba, which approves a plan to make Mexico an independent constitutional monarchy. In the early 19th century, Napoleon’s occupation of Spain led to the outbreak of revolts all across Spanish America. On September 16, 1810, […]

On August 24, 1914, the American poet Alan Seeger volunteers for service in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War. Born in New York City in 1888, Seeger attended Harvard University, where his illustrious classmates in the Class of 1910 included the poet John Reed and the journalist Walter Lippmann. After living in […]

Company A of the Third Battalion, 196th Light Infantry Brigade refuses the order of its commander, Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr., to continue an attack that had been launched to reach a downed helicopter shot down in the Que Son valley, 30 miles south of Da Nang. The unit had been in fierce combat for five […]

In Prague on August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union votes to demote Pluto from the ninth planet from the Sun to one of dozens of known dwarf planets. The vote followed a week of debate by the IAU, who voted on multiple proposals including one that kept not just Pluto as a planet but added two […]