August 20
From Metapedia
[edit] Events
- 1000 - The foundation of the Hungarian state, Hungary is established as a Christian kingdom by Stephen I of Hungary.
- 1866 - President Andrew Johnson formally declared the U.S. Civil War over.
- 1882 - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture debuts in Moscow.
- 1914 - World War I: German forces occupy Brussels.
- 1920 - The first commercial radio station, 8MK (WWJ), begins operations in Detroit, Michigan.
- 1940 - Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded in Mexico City by an assassin's ice axe. He dies the next day.
- 1953 - The Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
- 1960 - Senegal breaks from the Mali federation, declaring independence.
- 1968 - 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to end the "Prague Spring" of political liberalization.
- 1982 - Lebanese Civil War: A multinational force lands in Beirut to oversee the PLO withdrawal from Lebanon.
- 1988 - Iran-Iraq War: A cease-fire is agreed to after almost eight years of war.
- 1991 - Collapse of the Soviet Union, August Coup: More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union's parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev.
- 1991 - Estonia secedes from the Soviet Union.
- 1998 - U.S. embassy bombings: The United States military launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum is destroyed in the attack
[edit] Births
- 1833 - Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President of the United States (d. 1901)
- 1890 - H. P. Lovecraft, American writer (d. 1937)
- 1935 - Ron Paul, American politician
- 1941 - Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia (d. 2006)
[edit] Deaths
- 1811 - Louis Antoine de Bougainville, French explorer (b. 1729)
- 1854 - Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, German philosopher (b. 1775)
- 1912 - William Booth, English founder of the Salvation Army (b. 1829)
- 1917 - Adolf von Baeyer, German chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1835)
