TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS TUESDAY, AUG. 23, the 236th day of 2016. There are 130 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY: On this date in 1926, legendary silent film star Rudolph Valentino died in New York at age 31. In 1305, Scottish rebel leader Sir William Wallace was executed by the English for treason.

In 1775, Britain’s King George III proclaimed the American colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion.”

In 1913, Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story, was unveiled in the harbor of the Danish capital. In 1914, Japan declared war against Germany in World War I.

In 1927, amid protests, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery.

In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in Moscow.

In 1944, Romanian Prime Minister Ion Antonescu was dismissed by King Michael, allowing Romania to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies. In 1960, Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, 65, died in Doylestown, Pa.

In 1973, a bank robbery-turned-hostage-taking began in Stockholm, Sweden; the four hostages ended up empathizing with their captors, a psychological condition now referred to as “Stockholm Syndrome.”

In 1982, Lebanon’s parliament elected Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel president. (Gemayel was assassinated some three weeks later.) In 1989, in a case that inflamed racial tensions in New York, Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black teen, was shot dead after he and his friends were confronted by a group of white youths in Brooklyn. (Gunman Joey Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; he will be eligible for parole in 2022.)