TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

August 23, 1927

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

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1775

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

1913

Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story, was unveiled in the harbor of the Danish capital.

1914

Japan declared war against Germany in World War I.

1939

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

1960

Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, 65, died in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

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.”

1979

Soviet dancer Alexander Godunov defected while the Bolshoi Ballet was on tour in New York.

1999

The Dow Jones industrial average soared 199.15 to a then-record of 11,299.76.

2008

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama introduced his choice of running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, before a crowd outside the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.

2003

Former priest John Geoghan, the convicted child molester whose prosecution sparked the sex abuse scandal that shook the Roman Catholic Church nationwide, died after another inmate attacked him in a Massachusetts prison.