HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY

Today’s highlight:

On August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its first personal computer, the model 5150, at a press conference in New York.

On this date:

1859: Poet and English professor Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the words to “America the Beautiful,” was born in Falmouth, Mass.

1898: Fighting in the Spanish-American War came to an end.

1909: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home to the Indianapolis 500, first opened.

1937: President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Hugo Black to the U.S. Supreme

Court.

1944: During World War II, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., eldest son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was killed with his co-pilot when their explosives-laden Navy plane blew up over England.

1953: The Soviet Union conducted a secret test of its first hydrogen bomb.

1962: One day after launching Andrian Nikolayev into orbit, the

Soviet Union also sent up cosmonaut Pavel Popovich; both men landed safely Aug. 15.

1985: The world’s worst single-aircraft disaster occurred as a crippled Japan Airlines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people. Four people survived.

1992: After 14 months of negotiations, the United States, Mexico and Canada announced in Washington that they had concluded the North American Free Trade Agreement. Avantgarde composer John Cage died in New York at age 79.

2000: The Russian nuclear submarine Kursk and its 118-man crew were lost during naval exercises in the Barents Sea.

2004: New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey announced his resignation and acknowledged that he’d had an extramarital affair with another man.

Ten years ago: Declaring “the aggressor has been punished,” the Kremlin ordered a halt to Russia’s devastating assault on Georgia — five days of air and ground attacks that left homes in smoldering ruins and uprooted 100,000 people.