  | August 2008 | |
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| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| | | | | 1
Benin, called Dahomey at the time, became independent in 1960. | 2
Championship surfer Lisa Anderson was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame in 2002. |
3
Columbus began the first voyage of his Enterprise of the Indies in 1492. | 4
The U.S. Department of Energy was formed in 1977. | 5
The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty was laid on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor in 1884. | 6
Andy Warhol was born on this day in 1928. | 7
The first census count in the U.S. began on the first Monday in August of 1790. | 8
Mathematician Sir Roger Penrose was born in 1931. | 9
Mathematician John Fields, after whom the prestigious Fields Medal is named, died in 1932. |
10
Congress chartered the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. | 11
Hypercard, the first widely used hypertext program, was introduced on this day in 1987. | 12
The last quagga died in 1883, making the species extinct. | 13
Hernán Cortés captured Mexico City from the Aztecs on this date in 1521. | 14
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on this day in 1935. | 15
The MGM musical The Wizard of Oz premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood in 1939. | 16
Hugo Gernsback, inventor and publisher credited with popularizing the science fiction genre, was born in 1884. |
17
Marcus Garvey was born on this day in 1887. | 18
In an attempt to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Netscape released the Navigator 3.0 Web browser in 1996. | 19
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, the influential French fashion designer, was born in 1883. | 20
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a nearly $1 billion anti-poverty measure in 1964. | 21
Hawaii became the 50th state in the United States of America on this day in 1959. | 22
Mathematician, scientist and television personality Jacob Bronowski died in 1974. | 23
Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein II died in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, on this day in 1969. |
24
Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the city of Pompeii, on August 24, A.D. 79. | 25
Allan Pinkerton, famous for breaking strikes, was born in 1819. | 26
Art collector Peggy Guggenheim was born in 1898. | 27
In the midst of increasing tension in Asia, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, Prime Minister of Japan, invited President Roosevelt to meet with him in 1941. | 28
The first radio commercial aired on station WEAF in New York City in 1922. | 29
Charles Brace Darrow, official inventor of Monopoly, died in 1967. | 30
Guion S. Bluford, Jr. became the first African American astronaut to travel into space in 1983. |
31
Hurricane Carol hit the northeastern United States in 1954. | | | | | | |