On this day: August 7
The Purple Heart is born, a comic legend dies, a man on a wire goes for a stroll a quarter of a mile above the sidewalks of Manhattan, and U.S. embassies in Africa are targeted in a terrorist attack, all on this day.
1420: Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore begins in Florence.
1420: Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore begins in Florence.
1782: George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.
1789: The United States War Department, the cabinet-level department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army, is established. The War Department also bore responsibility for naval affairs until the establishment of the Navy Department in 1798 and for most land-based air forces until the creation of the Department of the Air Force in 1947.
1794: President George Washington invokes the Militia Law of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. The rebellion consisted of farmers upset over having to pay a new tax for grain sold in the form of whiskey.
1876: Mata Hari is born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. She would go on to be an exotic dancer, courtesan and accused spy who was executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for Germany during World War I.
1888: Inventor Theophilus Van Kannel receives a patent for the revolving door.
1903: British archaeologist Louis Leakey is born in British East Africa (modern-day Kenya). His work was important in establishing human evolutionary development in Africa.
1909: Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York City to San Francisco.
1927: The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo, N.Y.
1929: Former baseball player Don Larsen is born. He would go on to pitch the only perfect game in MLB postseason and World Series history when he did so for the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.
1938: The building of Mauthausen concentration camp begins in Germany. Initially a single camp at Mauthausen, it expanded over time and by the summer of 1940, the camp had become one of the largest labor camp complexes in German-controlled Europe. The largest prisoner of war contingent was Soviet, the second largest was Spanish.
1942: The Battle of Guadalcanal begins. The United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of World War II with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
1942: Garrison Keillor, host of "Prairie Home Companion," is born in Anoka, Minn.
1944: Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is born in New York City.
1955: Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, sells its first transistor radios in Japan.
1957: Oliver Hardy, one half of the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, dies at age 65 in North Hollywood, Calif., after suffering two strokes earlier in the month.
1959: The Lincoln Memorial design on the U.S. penny goes into circulation. It replaces the "sheaves of wheat" design, and was minted until 2008.
1959: Explorer 6 launches from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The small, spheroidal satellite was designed to study trapped radiation of various energies, galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetism, radio propagation in the upper atmosphere and the flux of micrometeorites. It also transmits the first pictures of Earth from orbit.
1960: Actor David Duchovny ("The X-Files," "Californication") is born in New York City.
1964: The U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving US President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces. The resolution was in response to a sea battle between the North Vietnamese Navy's Torpedo Squadron 135 and the destroyer USS Maddox on August 2.
1968: James Brown records the song "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" at Vox Studios in Los Angeles. The funk song would go on to become one of the most popular Black Power songs of the 1960s.
1971: The Apollo 15 command module returns to Earth, splashing down in the North Pacific Ocean. Although only two of the module's three parachutes deploy, it lands safely because the third chute is for redundancy and not necessary for landing.
1974: Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 1,368 feet in the air. He walks the wire for 45 minutes, making eight crossings between the towers. In addition to walking, he sits on the wire, gives knee salutes and, while lying on the wire, spoke with a gull circling above his head. He is arrested once he steps off the wire on the South Tower, although all formal charges are eventually dropped. The stunt was featured in the 2008 documentary "Man on a Wire."
1975: Actress Charlize Theron ("Monster," "Snow White and the Huntsman") is born in Benoni, South Africa.
1976: Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars. The orbiter worked until July 25, 1978, returning almost 16,000 images in 706 orbits around Mars.
1978: President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal in Niagra Falls, N.Y., due to toxic waste that had been negligently disposed of. This was the first time in American history that emergency funds were used other than for a natural disaster.
1981: The Washington Star ceases all operations after 128 years of publication.
1985: Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai (from left to right) are chosen to be Japan's first astronauts.
1987: Pittsburgh Penguins hockey player Sidney Crosby is born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
1991: Charges of assault and property damage are filed against Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses in connection with a riot during a July 1991 show in St. Louis. Rose sparked the riot when he jumped off the stage, attacked a fan videotaping the concert and then stormed off stage. The riot left 60 injured.
1992: "Unforgiven," starring Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman, debuts in theaters. The film would go on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Eastwood, Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Hackman, and Best Film Editing.
1997: Garth Brooks plays a free concert in New York's Central Park. In May of 1998, the New York Fire Department would officially announce the final attendance numbers at 980,000, making it the largest concert ever held in Central Park.
1998: The United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, kill approximately 212 people. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the American public for the first time, and resulted in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placing bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
2000: Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore chooses Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, making him the first Jewish candidate on a major party ticket.
2005: News anchor Peter Jennings dies of complications from lung cancer at the age of 67 in New York City.
2007: Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants breaks baseball great Hank Aaron's record by hitting his 756th home run.
