TODAY in HISTORY
Today is Sunday, August 6, the 218th day of 2017. There are 147 days left in the year. 1572 Fakhr-al-Din II, Ottoman prince is born. 1661 The Treaty of The Hague is signed by Portugal and the Dutch Republic. 1787 Sixty proof sheets of the Constitution of the US are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1819 Norwich University is founded in Vermont as the first private military school in the United States. 1870 Franco-Prussian War: The Battle of Spicheren is fought, resulting in a Prussian victory. 1914 World War I: Serbia declares war on Germany; Austria declares war on Russia. 1926 In New York City, the Warner Bros’ Vitaphone system premieres with the movie Don Juan starring John Barrymore. 1930 Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi in New York and disappears never to be seen again. 1945 World War II: Hiroshima, Japan is devastated when the atomic bomb “Little Boy” is dropped by the US B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly. 1960 Cuban Revolution: Cuba nationalises American and foreign-owned property in the nation. 1962 Jamaica becomes independent from the United Kingdom. 1965 US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. 1990 Gulf War: The United Nations Security Council orders a global trade embargo against Iraq in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. 1991 Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet. 1996 Nasa announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms. 2001 Erwadi fire incident, 28 mentally ill persons tied to a chain were burnt to death at a faith based institution at Erwadi, Tamil Nadu. 2008 A military junta led by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz stages a coup d’état in Mauritania, overthrowing president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi. 2010 Flash floods across a large part of Jammu and Kashmir, India, damages 71 towns and kills at least 255 people. 2011 War in Afghanistan: A United States military helicopter is shot down, killing 30 American special forces members and a working dog, 7 Afghan soldiers, and 1 Afghan civilian. It was the deadliest single event for the United States in the War in Afghanistan. 2012 Nasa’s Curiosity rover lands on the surface of Mars.