This Day in History
On August 23, 1775, Britain’s King George III proclaimed the American colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion.”
On this date:
In 1754, France’s King Louis XVI was born at Versailles.
In 1785, U.S. naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry was born in South Kingstown, R.I.
In 1912, actor, dancer, director and choreographer Gene Kelly was born Eugene Curran Kelly in Pittsburgh.
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 worldwide protests, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery. (On the 50th anniversary of their executions, then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted.)
In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in Moscow.
In 1960, Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, 65, died in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
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. (However, 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 youth, was shot dead after he and his friends were confronted by a group of white youths in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. (Gunman Joey Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; he will be eligible for parole in 2022.)
In 2000, an estimated 51 million viewers tuned in for the finale of the first season of the CBS reality show “Survivor,” in which contestant Richard Hatch won the $1 million prize.