Aug. 19
Today in history
Today is Aug. 19. On this date in:
14: Augustus, né Octavian, the first Roman emperor proper, died at 75. The adopted son of Julius Caesar revived the city’s republican institutions to put a traditional front on his power while he overhauled the empire. Caesar was technically a dictator, not an emperor.
1791: Mathematician Benjamin Banneker wrote to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, condemning his hypocrisy for owning slaves. It was “pitiable,” he wrote, that the man who spoke of the equal rights God conferred on all people “should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others.”
1812: The USS Constitution defeated HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia. Witnesses
said the British shot bounced off the Constitution’s sides as if the ship were made of iron, leading to the ship’s nickname, “Old Ironsides.”
1839: Louis Daguerre announced at the French Academy of Sciences that he had invented a device to chemically fix a “truthful likeness” of an image on a copper plate. The French government bought the rights to the daguerreotype process and released details to the public for free, though the process had been patented in England and Wales on Aug. 14.
1856: Gail Borden patented the first commercially viable process to condense milk in an anaerobic vacuum boiler. He opened factories that grew into one of the largest dairy corporations in the world. Borden Eagle Brand condensed milk is still sold today.
1934: German voters approved a referendum allowing Adolf Hitler’s merger of the presidency and chancellorship by a 90% vote. It resulted in an unprecedented consolidation of power in the young republic, making Hitler for all intents and purposes a dictator. Historians say the high vote total was due to both intimidation and the fear of communism.
1936: Joseph Stalin began the Great Purge of his rivals, prominent Old Bolsheviks, as the first show trial opened. All 16 defendants were found guilty and executed.
1953: Iran’s military overthrew democratically elected Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had nationalized the country’s oil industry. The U.S. and British governments funded and helped organize the coup, which restored the Shah of Iran to power.
1991: A car driven by Yosef Lifsh struck two Black children in Brooklyn, New York, killing 7-year-old Gavin Cato. In the immediate aftermath, violence raged for multiple days between members of the Black and Hasidic Jewish communities in what is known as the Crown Heights riots, resulting in the death of Hasidic Jew Yankel Rosenbaum.
2004: Google went public. The company chose to sell shares in a public auction to make them more available to ordinary people. The initial results were disappointing: $1.67 billion, $85 a share.
2011: The “West Memphis Three” were released from prison after 18 years. As teenagers, they were convicted of murdering three 8-year-old boys, allegedly as part of Satanic rites. The release followed new DNA evidence that did not implicate them and instead tied another man to the scene.
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, August 19
