August 18
1590
John White, the governor of the Roanoke Island colony in present-day North Carolina, returned from a supply-trip to England to find the settlement deserted. White and his men found no trace of the 100 or so colonists he left behind, and there was no sign of violence. The colony continues to be known as "The Lost Colony" and only theories remain to what actually happened to the colonists. In 1998, archaeologists studying tree-ring data from Virginia found that extreme drought conditions persisted between 1587 and 1589. These conditions undoubtedly contributed to the demise of the so-called Lost Colony, but where the settlers went after they left Roanoke remains a mystery. One theory has them being absorbed into a Native American tribe known as the Croatans.
1920
The 19th amendment, which guarantees all American women the right to vote, is ratified. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation and protest. Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change of the Constitution. Few early supporters lived to see final victory in 1920. Despite the ratification of the amendment and the decades-long contributions of Black women to achieve suffrage, poll taxes, local laws and other restrictions continued to block women—and men—of color from voting. It would take more than 40 years for all women to achieve voting equality.
1992
Celebrated Boston Celtics forward and future multi-time Hall of Famer Larry Bird retired. Bird entered the NBA in 1979 and had an immediate impact on the league, winning Rookie of the Year. The Celtics would win NBA titles in '81, '84 and '86, with Byrd winning NBA MVP '85-'86. As his career progressed, though, Bird began to suffer from chronic back pain that, by the 1990s, limited both his playing time and his effectiveness. After winning gold in Barcelona with The Dream Team, Bird retired. He remained with the Celtics as a special assistant until becoming the Pacers head coach in 1997. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1998, the same year he was named NBA Coach of the Year.
August 19
1812
The U.S. Navy frigate USS Constitution defeated the British frigate Guerrière in a furious engagement off the coast of Nova Scotia during the War of 1812. Witnesses claimed that the British shot merely bounced off the Constitution‘s sides, as if the ship were made of iron rather than wood. By the war’s end, “Old Ironsides” destroyed or captured seven more British ships. The success of the USS Constitution against the supposedly invincible Royal Navy provided a tremendous boost in morale for the young American republic. After the war, Old Ironsides served as the flagship of the navy’s Mediterranean squadron and in 1828 was laid up in Boston. In 1855, the Constitution retired from active military service, but the famous vessel continued to serve the United States, first as a training ship and later as a touring national landmark.
1909
The first race was held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, now the home of the world’s most famous motor racing competition, the Indianapolis 500. Built on 328 acres of farmland five miles northwest of Indianapolis, Indiana, the speedway was started by local businessmen as a testing facility for Indiana’s growing automobile industry. Since 1911, the Indianapolis 500 has been held every year, with the exception of 1917-18 and 1942-45, when the United States was involved in the two world wars. With an average crowd of 400,000, the Indy 500 is the best-attended event in U.S. sports. The last of the speedway’s original bricks were covered in 1961, except for a three-foot line of bricks left exposed at the start-finish line as a nostalgic reminder of the track’s history.
1964
More than six months after taking the East Coast by storm during their historic television appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles kicked off first U.S. tour at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Within the first few seconds of the first song that night, at least one journalist had been trampled and a female fan had broken a leg in the building pandemonium. Though John, Paul, George and Ringo were uninjured, they left the Cow Palace that night by ambulance after their limousine was swarmed by berserk fans. It was a scene that would become familiar to them as they continued on their first historic tour of America in the months ahead.
August 20
1911
A dispatcher in the New York Times office sent the first telegram around the world via commercial service. The Times decided to send the telegram in order to determine how fast a commercial message could be sent around the world by telegraph cable. The message, reading simply, “This message sent around the world,” left the dispatch room on the 17th floor of the Times building in New York at 7 p.m. on August 20. After it traveled more than 28,000 miles, being relayed by 16 different operators, through San Francisco, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, Malta, Lisbon and the Azores–among other locations–the reply was received by the same operator 16.5 minutes later.
1920
Professional football was born when seven men, including legendary all-around athlete and football star Jim Thorpe, met to organize a professional football league at the Jordan and Hupmobile Auto Showroom in Canton, Ohio. The meeting led to the creation of the American Professional Football Conference (APFC), the forerunner to the hugely successful National Football League. On September 17, the league met again, changing its short-lived name to the American Professional Football Association (APFA) and officially electing Jim Thorpe as the league’s first president.
1982
U.S. Marines were deployed to Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War as part of a multinational force with France, Italy, and Great Britain. 800 U.S. Marines land in Beirut to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal from Lebanon. It was the beginning of a problem-plagued mission that would stretch into 17 months and leave 262 U.S. servicemen dead. On October 23, Lebanese terrorists evaded security measures and drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. military personnel. On February 7, 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced the end of U.S. participation in the peacekeeping force.
August 21
1858
Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Abraham Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and one-time U.S. representative from Illinois, began a series of famous public encounters on the issue of slavery. The two politicians, the former a Northern Democrat and the latter a Republican, were competing for Douglas’ U.S. Senate seat. In the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates—all about three hours long—Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or allow slavery. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party. Lincoln would go on to win the presidency in 1860, which signaled the secession of the Southern states.
1959
The modern United States received its crowning star when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Hawaii into the Union as the 50th state. The president also issued an order for an American flag featuring 50 stars arranged in staggered rows: five six-star rows and four five-star rows. The new flag became official July 4, 1960. Many in Congress opposed the formal annexation of Hawaii, and it was not until 1898, following the use of the naval base at Pearl Harbor during the Spanish-American War, that Hawaii’s strategic importance became evident and formal annexation was approved. During World War II, Hawaii became firmly ensconced in the American national identity following the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
1980
Animal rights advocates Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA has been criticized from all sides—many believe them to be extremists and find their methods distasteful, while other activists criticize PETA’s willingness to work with corporations in industries like fast food or fashion to make incremental improvements to animal welfare. Nonetheless, PETA has achieved a litany of animal-rights reforms: convincing some of the world’s largest fashion brands not to use fur, animal-testing bans by thousands of personal-care companies, ending the use of animals in automobile crash tests, closing the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus and exposing thousands of instances of animal cruelty across the world are just a few of the organization’s accomplishments.
August 22
1851
The U.S.-built schooner America bested a fleet of Britain’s finest ships in a race around England’s Isle of Wight. The ornate silver trophy won by the America was later donated to the New York Yacht Club on condition that it be forever placed in international competition. Today, the “America’s Cup” is the world’s oldest continually contested sporting trophy and represents the pinnacle of international sailing yacht competition. Since the 1920s, the America’s Cup race has been between one defending vessel and one challenging vessel, both of which are determined by separate elimination trials. In 1983, the United States lost the trophy for the first time in 132 years when Australia II defeated Liberty off Newport, Rhode Island.
1950
Officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) accepted Althea Gibson into their annual championship at Forest Hills, New York, making her the first African American player to compete in a U.S. national tennis competition. In the early 1960s, Gibson became the first Black player to compete on the women’s golf tour, though she never won a tournament. She was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1971. Though she once brushed off comparisons to Jackie Robinson, the trailblazing Black baseball player, Gibson has been credited with paving the way for African American tennis champions such as Arthur Ashe and, more recently, Venus and Serena Williams. After a long illness, she died in 2003 at the age of 76.
1989
Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers became the first pitcher in major league history to register 5,000 career strikeouts. Ryan would go on to rack up a total of 5,714 strikeouts, over 1,500 more than his closest competition. Ryan had requested before the game that play not be stopped to honor him. Instead, after the fifth inning, Ryan was saluted by President George H. W. Bush in a videotaped message. (The president’s son George W. Bush was then the owner of the Rangers.) Ryan is most famous for his record seven no-hitters; the last came in 1991 when he was 44 years old. Ryan retired in 1993 and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1999 after a record 27 year career.
August 23
1966
Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. While a remarkable image at the time, the full resolution of the image was never retrieved from the data stored from the mission. In 2008, this earthrise image was restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center. They obtained the original data tapes from the mission (the last surviving set) and restored original FR-900 tape drives to operational condition using both 60s era parts and modern electronics.
2000
Richard Hatch, a 39-year-old corporate trainer from Rhode Island, won the season-one finale of the reality television show Survivor and took home the promised $1 million prize. Survivor, whose slogan is “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast,” was a huge ratings success and spawned numerous imitators in the reality-competition genre. Produced by Mark Burnett (The Voice, The Apprentice), Survivor premiered on May 31, 2000, on CBS. The show centers around a group of sixteen strangers who are stranded for 39 days in a remote location where they must fend for food, water and shelter and compete in various challenges to win rewards and immunity from being voted out of the competition by their fellow contestants.
2008
The star-studded American women's basketball team led by the likes of Lisa Leslie, Sue Bird & Diana Taurasi win the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics with a convincing 92-65 win over Australia. The US women's team blew away their competition by an average margin of victory of 37.6 points a game en route to an unblemished 8-0 slate. In capturing the 2008 gold medal, the USA became the first women's traditional team sport to claim four straight gold medals, cementing USA Basketball's place as the most dominant program in women's U.S. Olympic Team history. Further, the win extended the USA's Olympic winning streak to 33 games, dating back to 1992 bronze medal victory over Cuba, and marked the USA's third straight victory over Australia in the Olympic gold medal game.
August 24
1873
William Henry Jackson became the first person to photograph Colorado’s elusive Mount of the Holy Cross, a natural cross of snow that lay hidden high in the rugged mountains of Colorado. The subject of myths and legends for years, the photo provided reliable proof of its existence and, to some, the mountain top became a religious symbol of Manifest Destiny. After thousands of years of erosion, two deep ravines have formed in the steep rocky face of the mountain peak. Intersecting at a 90-degree angle, the ravines shelter the winter snow from the sun well after the rest of the mountain snow has melted away. For a brief time, a nearly perfect cross of snow appears on the rock face, though it often melts away later in the summer.
1981
Mark David Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for the murder of John Lennon, a founding member of The Beatles. On December 8, 1980, Chapman shot and killed the 40-year-old singer, songwriter and peace activist, outside Lennon’s New York City apartment building, the Dakota, where he lived with his wife Yoko Ono and their young son Sean. Chapman initially entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity; however, he later decided to drop the insanity defense and plead guilty to second-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing on August 24, 1981, Chapman read from The Catcher in the Rye. Chapman’s requests for parole have all been denied and he continues to serve time in prison in New York.
1992
Hurricane Andrew made landfall in South Florida after causing extensive damage in the Bahamas. The Category 5 storm had sustained wind speeds as high as 165mph and gusts up to 174mph. Causing $27.3 billion in damages, Andrew was the costliest hurricane to hit the US until Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In the United States alone, the powerful storm took the lives of 65 people, destroyed 63,500 homes while damaging 124,000 more and felled 70,000 acres of trees in the Everglades. Hurricane Andrew remains only one of four tropical cyclones to make landfall in the continental United States as a Category 5.