Monday, August 7, 2017

THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― AUGUST 7

August 7 is the 219th day of the year (220th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 146 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Wednesday or Thursday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Saturday (56).

This day marks the approximate midpoint of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and of winter in the Southern Hemisphere (starting the season at the June solstice).


NATIONAL PURPLE HEART DAY 

322 BC Battle of Crannon between Athens and Macedonia. It was was the decisive battle of the Lamian War. Macedonian victory, though militarily unspectacular, convinced the other Greeks to sue for peace. This marked the end of city-state freedom from Macedonian hegemony in Greece.

1420 – Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore begins in Florence. It was eventually completed by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1469.

1782 – George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.

1794 – President George Washington invokes the Militia Acts of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York, New York to San Francisco, California.

1930 – The last confirmed lynching of blacks in the Northern United States occurs in Marion, Indiana; two men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, are killed.

1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal begins as the United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.

1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, sells its first transistor radios in Japan.

1959 – The Lincoln Memorial design on the U.S. penny goes into circulation. It replaces the "sheaves of wheat" design, and was minted until 2008.

1959 – Explorer program: Explorer 6 launches from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

1970 – California judge Harold Haley is taken hostage in his courtroom and killed during an effort to free George Jackson from police custody.

1978 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal due to toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently.

1990 – First American soldiers arrive in Saudi Arabia as part of the Gulf War.

1998 Bombings at United States embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya kill approximately 212 people.

2008 – The start of the Russo-Georgian War over the territory of South Ossetia.



TODAY'S BIRTHS

1742 Nathanael Greene, American general (d. 1786)

1903 Louis Leakey, Kenyan-English palaeontologist and archaeologist (d. 1972)

1942 Garrison Keillor, American humorist, novelist, short story writer, and radio host

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

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