TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Sunday, Aug. 15, the 227th day of 2021. There are 138 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History: On August 15, 1945, in a prerecorded radio address, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced that his country had accepted terms of surrender for ending World War II.
On this date:
In 1057, Macbeth, King of Scots, was killed in battle by Malcolm, the eldest son of King Duncan, whom Macbeth had slain.
In 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened as the SS Ancon crossed the just-completed waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
In 1935, humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post were killed when their airplane crashed near Point Barrow in the Alaska Territory.
In 1939, the MGM musical “The Wizard of Oz” opened at the Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
In 1944, during World War
II, Allied forces landed in southern France in Operation Dragoon.
In 1947, India became independent after some 200 years of British rule.
In 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened in upstate New York.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon announced a 90-day freeze on wages, prices and rents.
In 1998, 29 people were killed by a car bomb that tore apart the center of Omagh (OH’-mah), Northern Ireland; a splinter group calling itself the Real IRA claimed responsibility.
In 2003, bouncing back from the largest blackout in U.S. history, cities from the Midwest to Manhattan restored power to millions of people.
In 2015, Japanese Emperor Akihito expressed rare “deep remorse” over his country’s wartime actions in an address marking the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, a day after the prime minister fell short of apologizing to victims of Japanese aggression. Civil rights leader Julian Bond, 75, died in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
In 2017, President Donald Trump, who’d faced harsh criticism for initially blaming the deadly weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia on “many sides,” told reporters that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the confrontation and that groups protesting against the white supremacists were “also very violent.” (In between those statements, at the urging of aides, Trump had offered a more direct condemnation of white supremacists.)