First “Survivor” finale airs

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 […]

Despite demonstrations in support of their innocence, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed for the 1920 murders of a shoe company paymaster and his guard.

On August 23, 1945, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, (captured by the Japanese on the island of Corregidor, in the Philippines), is freed by Russian forces from a POW camp in Manchuria, China. When President Franklin Roosevelt transferred Gen. Douglas MacArthur from his command in the Philippines to Australia in March 1942, Maj. Gen. Wainwright, until […]

On August 23, 1947, the first Little League World Series championship game—the culmination of a three-day tournament in Williamsport, Pennsylvania—features teams from Pennsylvania. Before roughly 2,500 fans, Maynard, a team from Williamsport, defeats Lock Haven, 16-7, to win the title at Original Field. Although it is called the “World Series,” 11 of the 12 teams in […]

On August 23, 1970, Lou Reed, lead singer and primary songwriter of the pioneering alt-rock band the Velvet Underground play their last gig together at the famous Manhattan rock club Max’s Kansas City. One of the most influential American bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Velvet Underground had an impact on modern […]

The first cases of an encephalitis outbreak are reported in New York City on August 23, 1999. Seven people die from what turns out to be the first cases of West Nile virus in the United States. A cluster of eight cases of St. Louis encephalitis was diagnosed among patients in the borough of Queens […]

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 […]