August 24

From Metapedia

[edit] Events

• 79 - Mount Vesuvius erupts. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae are buried in volcanic ash.
• 410 - The Visigoths under Alaric begin to pillage Rome for three days.
• 1456 - The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed.
• 1682 - William Penn receives the area that is now the state of Delaware, and adds it to his colony of Pennsylvania.
• 1690 - Calcutta, India is founded.
• 1814 - British troops invade Washington, D.C. and burn down the White House and several other buildings.
• 1857 - The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history.
• 1891 - Thomas Edison patents the motion picture camera.
• 1912 - Alaska becomes a United States territory.
• 1939 - The German-Soviet Pact is signed between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
• 1944 - World War II: Allied troops start the attack on Paris.
• 1949 - The treaty creating NATO goes into effect.
• 1968 - France explodes its first hydrogen bomb, thus becoming the world's fifth nuclear power.
• 1991
  • Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
  • Ukraine declares itself independent from the Soviet Union.

[edit] Births

• 1817 - Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Russian writer (d. 1875)
• 1922 - Howard Zinn, American historian and activist
• 1923 - Arthur Jensen, American psychologist
• 1929 - Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader (d. 2004)
• 1955 - Mike Huckabee, American politician

[edit] Deaths

• 1967 - Henry J. Kaiser, American industrialist (b. 1882)