Today:
79 – Mount Vesuvius traditionally was believed to have erupted on August 24, burying Pompeii and Herculaneum. Modern archaeological evidence suggests the eruption may actually have occurred later in the year, probably in October.
410 – Visigoths led by King Alaric entered and sacked Rome. It was the first time in roughly 800 years that the city had fallen to a foreign enemy and became a powerful symbol of the declining Western Roman Empire.
1215 – Pope Innocent III declared Magna Carta invalid, little more than two months after King John had agreed to it at Runnymede. The dispute helped plunge England back into civil war.
1456 – The Gutenberg Bible’s completion is traditionally associated with this date. Johannes Gutenberg’s use of movable type helped revolutionize the production and distribution of books in Europe.
1814 – British troops captured Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812 and burned the White House, the Capitol and other government buildings. First Lady Dolley Madison had fled after ensuring that a famous portrait of George Washington was saved.
1857 – The Panic of 1857 began when the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed. The financial crisis soon spread throughout the United States and internationally.
1891 – Thomas Edison filed a patent application for the kinetograph, an early motion-picture camera developed at his laboratory and an important step toward the birth of the movie industry.
1932 – Amelia Earhart began the first nonstop transcontinental flight across the United States by a woman, departing Los Angeles and landing in Newark, New Jersey, the following day.
1949 – The North Atlantic Treaty formally came into effect, establishing NATO as a collective-defense alliance among the United States, Canada and ten Western European nations.
2006 – The International Astronomical Union adopted a new definition of a planet, reclassifying Pluto as a “dwarf planet” after 76 years as the ninth planet in our solar system.
