On August 1st...

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Lammas Day
Swiss National Holiday

1291 The Swiss Confederation was established.

1714 Queen Anne of England died.

1770 American explorer William Clark was born.

1774 Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen.
1774 Naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck was born.

1779 Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner," was born.

1785 Caroline Herschel became the first woman to be credited with discovering a comet.

1794 The Whiskey Rebellion began in western Pennsylvania.

1815 Richard Henry Dana, lawyer, adventurer, and writer, was born.

1818 The first stretch of the Cumberland Road, from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia, was completed.
1818 Maria Mitchell, the first woman professional astronomer, was born.

1819 Novelist Herman Melville was born.

1831 London Bridge opened to traffic.

1832 The Black Hawk War ended.

1834 Robert Morrison, Protestant missionary to China and translator of the Bible into Chinese, died.

1838 The apprenticeship system was abolished in most of the British Empire.

1843 American statesman Robert Todd Lincoln was born.

1863 The Battle of Little Rock (Arkansas) was fought.

1864 The Battle of Petersburg (Virginia) was fought.

1876 Colorado became the 38th state.

1893 Henry Perky and William Ford patented shredded wheat.

1903 Performance artist Calamity Jane died.

1907 The U.S. Army Signal Corps started an aircraft division.

1911 Harriet Quimby became the first American woman to get a pilot's license.

1914 The Central Powers declared war on Russia, beginning the First World War.

1916 Hawaii National Park was established.

1920 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, early leader of the Indian independence movement, died.

1923 Geologist and explorer Raphael Pumpelly died.

1924 King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was born.

1929 Hafizullah Amin, President of Afghanistan, was born.

1933 Actor Dom LeLuise was born.

1936 Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent was born.

1941 The first Jeep was produced.

1942 Musician Jerry Garcia was born.

1944 Anne Frank made her last diary entry.
1944 Manuel Quezon, 2nd President of the Philippines, died.

1946 The U.S. Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, providing for civilian control of nuclear energy.

1948 The U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations was founded.

1950 The Guam Organic Act established Guam as an unincorporated U.S. territory.

1957 Eleven persons were killed and another 50 injured when a railway shed exploded in Assansol, India.
1957 Fifty-seven people drowned when the boat they were on capsized in the Hooghly River at Calcutta, India.
1957 U.S. troops began leaving Japan.

1960 Benin gained independence from France (as Dahomey).
1960 Chubby Checker released "The Twist."

1973 The Treaty of Chaguaramas, establishing the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), went into effect.

1977 Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2 plane shot down by the Soviet Union, died.

1978 Rain falling at nearly one inch per hour caused a series of floods in central Texas that left more than 25 persons dead.

1981 Playwright Paddy Chayefsky died.
1981 Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos was killed in a plane crash.

1997 Author William Seward Burroughs died.

2005 King Fahd of Saudi Arabia died.

2009 Corazon Aquino, former President of the Philippines, died.

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This page was last updated on August 03, 2017.