THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― AUGUST 20

August 20 is the 232nd day of the year (233rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 133 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Monday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Tuesday or Wednesday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Friday or Sunday (56).

NATIONAL WAFFLE DAY

1308 – Pope Clement V pardons Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, absolving him of charges of heresy. 

1794 – Battle of Fallen Timbers: American troops force a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat. 

1852 – The Steamboat Atlantic sank on Lake Erie after a collision, with the loss of at least 150 lives. 

1858 – Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's same theory. 

1866 – President Andrew Johnson formally declares the American Civil War over. 

1882 – Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture debuts in Moscow, Russia.

1940 – World War II: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes the fourth of his famous wartime speeches, containing the line "Never was so much owed by so many to so few". 

1950 – Korean War: United Nations repel an offensive by North Korean divisions attempting to cross the Nakdong River and assault the city of Taegu. 

1968 – Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring. 

1975 – Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars. 

1977 – Voyager program: NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft. 

1986 – In Edmond, Oklahoma, U.S. Postal employee Patrick Sherrill guns down 14 of his co-workers and then commits suicide. A new term is coined, "going postal".

1988 – "Black Saturday" of the Yellowstone fire in Yellowstone National Park.

1988 – Iran–Iraq War: A ceasefire is agreed after almost eight years of war. 

1991 – Dissolution 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. 

1998 – U.S. embassy bombings: The United States launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

2007 – China Airlines Flight 120 caught fire and exploded after landing at Naha Airport in Okinawa, Japan. 

2008 – Spanair Flight 5022, from Madrid, Spain to Gran Canaria, skids off the runway and crashes at Barajas Airport. Of the 172 people on board, 146 die immediately, and eight more later die of injuries sustained in the crash. 

2016 – 54 people are killed when a suicide bomber detonates himself at a Kurdish wedding party in Gaziantep, Turkey.

TODAY'S BIRTHS

1833 – Benjamin Harrison, American general, lawyer, and politician, 23rd President of the United States (d. 1901)

1890 – H. P. Lovecraft, American short story writer, editor, novelist (d. 1937)

1910 – Eero Saarinen, Finnish-American architect and furniture designer, designed the Gateway Arch (d. 1961)

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.