Today in history

Today is Thursday, Aug. 27, the 240th day of 2020. There are 126 days left in the year. In 1776, the Battle of Long Island began during the Revolutionary War as British troops attacked American forces who ended up being forced to retreat two days later.

In 1858, the second debate between senatorial candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place in Freeport, Ill.

In 1908, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, was born near Stonewall, Texas. In 1949, a violent white mob prevented an outdoor concert headlined by Paul Robeson from taking place near Peekskill, New York. (The concert was held eight days later.)

In 1963, author, journalist and civil rights activist

W.E.B. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, at age 95.

In 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson accepted his party’s nomination for a term in his own right, telling the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “Let us join together in giving every American the fullest life which he can hope for.”

In 1979, British war hero Lord Louis Mountbatten and three other people, including his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, were killed off the coast of

Ireland in a boat explosion claimed by the Irish Republican Army.

In 1989, the first U.S. commercial satellite rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida — a Delta booster carrying a British communications satellite, the Marcopolo 1.

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