TODAY IN HISTORY

1715: following a reign of 72 years, King Louis XIV of France died four days before his 77th birthday.

1897: the first section of Boston’s new subway system was opened.

1923: the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were devastated by an earthquake that claimed some 140,000 lives.

1939: World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

1942: U.S. District Court Judge Martin I. Welsh, ruling from Sacramento, California, on a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Fred Korematsu, upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.

1945: Americans received word of Japan’s formal surrender that ended World War II. (Because of the time difference, it was Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, where the ceremony took place.)

1969: a coup in Libya brought Moammar Gadhafi to power.

1972: American Bobby Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik (RAY’-kyuhvik), Iceland, as Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union resigned before the resumption of Game 21. An arson fire at the Blue Bird Cafe in Montreal, Canada, claimed 37 lives.

1985: a U.S.-French expedition located the wreckage of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean roughly 400 miles off Newfoundland.

2005: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a “desperate SOS” as his city descended into anarchy amid the flooding left by Hurricane Katrina.

2009: Vermont’s law allowing same-sex marriage went into effect.

2015: invoking “God’s authority,” Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis denied marriage licenses to gay couples again in direct defiance of the federal courts, and vowed not to resign, even under the pressure of steep fines or jail. (Davis would spend five days in jail; she was released only after her staff issued the licenses on her behalf but removed her name from the form.)

2012: President Barack Obama ridiculed the just-completed Republican National Convention as better-suited to an era of black-and-white TV and “trickle-down, you’re on your own” economics, and declared that Mitt Romney “did not offer a single new idea” for fixing the economy. Lyricist Hal David, 91, who teamed with Burt Bacharach on dozens of timeless songs for movies, television and a variety of recording artists in the 1960s and beyond, died in Los Angeles.