On August 24th...

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79 Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and Herculaneum.

1456 The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.

1662 The Act of Uniformity required the English to accept the Book of Common Prayer.

1682 Duke James of York gave Delaware to William Penn.

1690 Job Charnock founded Calcutta, India.

1704 The Battle of Malaga, the largest naval battle in the War of the Spanish Succession, was fought.

1752 The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day began in Paris, France.

1759 William Wilberforce, British statesman and crusader against slavery, was born.

1814 British troops captured Washington, D.C., and burned the White House.

1819 American naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry died.

1853 The first potato chips were prepared by chef George Crum, in Saratoga Springs, New York.

1857 The Panic of 1857 began with the failure of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company.

1865 King Ferdinand of Romania was born.

1866 The Principality of Liechtenstein gained independence from the German Confederation.

1869 Cornelius Swarthout patented the waffle iron.

1891 The Edison Company filed a patent for the Kinetoscope.

1912 The District of Alaska became an organized incorporated territory of the United States.

1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to complete a non-stop transcontinental flight.

1936 The Australian Antarctic Territory was created.

1946 U.S. Supreme Court Justice James C. McReynolds died.

1950 Edith Sampson was named the first black U.S. delegate to the United Nations.

1954 The Communist Party was outlawed in the United States.

1955 American politician Mike Huckabee was born.

1956 The first non-stop transcontinental helicopter flight arrived in Washington, D.C.

1958 Actor Steve Guttenberg was born.

1959 Hiram L. Fong was sworn in as the first Chinese-American Senator and Daniel K. Inouye was sworn in as the first Japanese-American Representative.

1960 Baseball player Cal Ripkin was born.

1961 Jacqueline Cochran flew a supersonic jet trainer to an average speed of 844.2 mph to set a new world speed record for women.

1965 Actress Marlee Matlin was born.

1970 A bomb blast at the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin killed a graduate student and caused $6,000,000 worth of damage.
1970 Abdullah Khalil, former Prime Minister of Sudan, died.

1978 Singer Louis Prima died.

1981 Mark David Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for the murder of John Lennon.

1989 Pete Rose was banned from Major League baseball for life for gambling.

1991 Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

1998 Comedian Jerry Clower died.

2006 The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a "dwarf planet."

2016 Walter Scheel, former President of Germany, died.

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This page was last updated on August 24, 2018.