Today in Your History — August
A look at the people, events and popular culture that shaped our lives
AARP Members Only Access, August 2022
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PHOTO BY: Liba Taylor/Corbis via Getty Images
Aug. 31: Princess Diana dies in a car crash (1997)
In the early-morning hours of Aug. 31, 1997, Princess Diana’s life was cut tragically short when she and her boyfriend, Egyptian film producer Dodi Al Fayed, were involved in a car accident in Paris while trying to escape from the paparazzi. Photographers on motorbikes were chasing her Mercedes after the couple left the Ritz Hotel when the car hit a pillar and then smashed into the wall of a tunnel under the Place d’Alma. Al Fayed and the driver were killed instantly, and Diana and her bodyguard were pulled from the wreckage. The 36-year-old royal was rushed to the hospital but succumbed to her injuries at 3 a.m. Queen Elizabeth II was criticized for waiting to respond to the tragedy, and on Sept. 5 she appeared in a televised address, saying: “No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her. I, for one, believe there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death. I share in your determination to cherish her memory.” Reports showed that the driver, Henri Paul, had three times the French legal limit of alcohol in his blood and was driving at high speeds, though later there were conspiracy theories about the accident. In fact, Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi’s father and the owner of Harrods, hired a former police chief to head a private investigation, and he publicly claimed that the royal family had ordered Diana’s execution. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jean-Marc Charles/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Aug. 30: 150 millionth visitor sees Eiffel Tower (1993)
The Eiffel Tower has become such an enduring symbol of the City of Light that it may be hard to believe that it was originally scheduled to be torn down and turned into scrap metal in 1909. City officials only agreed to give it a stay of execution when they saw the potential for using it as a radiotelegraph tower. Over the years the landmark has attracted millions of tourists, and on this date in 1993, 33-year-old police officer Jacqueline Martinez happened to be lucky number 150,000,000! Upon her arrival, an orchestra played Charles Trenet’s “La Tour Eiffel,” and city officials handed her flowers and the keys to a new Citroen ZX, worth about $17,000. “For me, it’s a very big day,” said Martinez, who worked as a security guard at Roissy Airport. “I’ve already been here several times, but it’s the first time I’ve been with my family.” Today the tower attracts almost 7 million visitors a year, with about 75 percent of them coming from abroad — and the total number of tourists who have made the trip since the tower’s opening in 1889 is now closer to 300 million. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Paul Sakuma/AP Photo
Aug. 29: Netflix DVD-rental business forms (1997)
Long before it became an Oscar- and Emmy-winning media juggernaut, Netflix started as a DVD-rental service — the internet’s answer to Blockbuster — when it was founded on Aug. 29, 1997, by entrepreneurs Reed Hasting and Marc Randolph. The idea came to Hastings when he racked up a $40 late fee for forgetting to return his Apollo 13 VHS tape to a rental store. At about the same time, a new media format, the DVD, was being introduced to the American public, in March 1997. Hastings knew that there was potential for a mail-based movie-rental business, though VHS tapes were too cumbersome to send quickly through the mail. Could DVDs be the answer? As he told Fortune in 2009, “I ran out to Tower Records in Santa Cruz, California, and mailed CDs to myself, just a disc in an envelope. It was a long 24 hours until the mail arrived back at my house, and I ripped them open and they were all in great shape. That was the big excitement point.” By September 1999 the company would introduce its popular subscription-based model, which quickly saw 80 percent of users renew from a free trial to a paid subscription; within a decade, that number had risen to 90 percent, and the rest is history. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: AP Photo
Aug. 28: MLK delivers I Have a Dream speech (1963)
On Aug. 28, 1963, during the March on Washington, about 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a rousing speech on civil rights. It turned out to be one of the defining oratories in American history, as compelling and influential as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. King kicked off the speech with a reference to the Great Emancipator: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But 100 years later, the Negro is still not free.” He continued, with the passion of the preacher that he was, listing his hopes for a truly free America. While many people remember lines like, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” he had almost skipped that part of the speech. He had debuted the “I have a dream” theme a few months earlier and didn’t want to repeat himself. But all that changed when, during a pause in his speech, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson urged him, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin, tell ’em about the dream!” With that, he pushed his papers aside, and began to improvise. His friend and draft speechwriter Clarence B. Jones told The Washington Post, “And then he grabs the lectern on the podium, so I turn to some unknown person next to me and I said, ‘These people don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.’” He finished his 17-minute address by quoting a spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images
Aug. 27: Obama nominated for president (2008)
At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Barack Obama, on Aug. 27, 2008, became the first Black person to be nominated for the presidency by either major party, after a bruising primary battle with then-Senator Hillary Clinton. That day, while the roll call was in progress on the convention floor, Clinton announced, “On behalf of the great state of New York, with appreciation for the spirit and dedication of all who are gathered here, with eyes firmly fixed on the future, with the spirit of unity… let’s declare all together with one voice right here and right now that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi seconded the motion, and the crowd roared a collective “aye,” making the nomination official by acclamation. The following day, Obama delivered his acceptance speech in front of a crowd of over 80,000 people at Mile High Stadium, which fell on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. “Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well off or well known, but shared a belief that, in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to,” he said, referring to his rousing 2004 DNC speech. “It is that promise that’s always set this country apart — that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: AP Photo
Aug. 26: Pope John Paul I starts short reign (1978)
Italian-born cardinal Albino Luciani was elected to the papacy on Aug. 26, 1978, becoming the first pope to choose a double name, John Paul I, to commemorate the two men who had come before him, John XXIII and Paul VI. While other recent popes had come from diplomatic or scholarly backgrounds, John Paul I was a country priest who had grown up in a poor family in the Italian mountains. On his first day in office, he said, “Never could I have imagined.” He was referred to as “the Smiling Pope” and was known for his cheerful demeanor. After 33 days, the Vatican announced that he had died at age 65 of an apparent heart attack, marking the shortest papal reign since the early 1600s. Conspiracy theories started cropping up about his death, and in 1984, British crime writer David Yallop published a book called In God’s Name, which posited that the pope had been poisoned before he could expose corruption at the highest levels, and he even named six people (including American archbishop Paul Marcinkus) who had motives. The book sold 6 million copies. Pope Francis later cleared the way for John Paul I to become a saint, crediting him with the miraculous recovery of a young Argentine girl’s acute inflammatory encephalopathy, and he’s set to be officially beatified on Sept. 4, 2022. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Steve Grayson/WireImage via Getty Images
Aug. 25: Singer Aaliyah killed in plane crash (2001)
Chart-topping R&B star Aaliyah was filming a music video in the Bahamas, when tragedy struck on Aug. 25, 2001. Taking off from Abaco Island, her twin-engine Cessna 402-B passenger plane crashed and burst into flames, killing the 22-year-old singer, the pilot and six other passengers, with another passenger dying later at a hospital. Reports said that the plane had been overloaded by hundreds of pounds, and pilot Luis Morales was found to have cocaine and alcohol in his system; he had been on probation for crack cocaine possession less than two weeks before the flight. On Aug. 31, fans lined up to see a public procession through the streets of Manhattan, which ended at St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church, and 22 birds were released after a private funeral — one for each year of her life. Among those at the service were Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, Mike Tyson and Jay-Z. Her self-titled album, which had been released in July, shot to number one on the charts, and the song for which she had been filming the music video, “Rock the Boat,” was nominated for best female R&B vocal performance at the 44th Grammys. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Petr David Josek/AP Photo
Aug. 24: Pluto is demoted to a dwarf planet (2006)
Pluto ended 76 years as a planet when the International Astronomical Union announced on Aug. 24, 2006, that it would be reclassified as a “dwarf planet.” According to the IAU, a celestial body must meet three criteria to be a planet: It has to orbit the sun, it has to be big enough that its gravity has forced it into a spherical shape and it has to have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit of other objects. Pluto, many astronomers said, failed on the last benchmark. Many nonscientists were upset by the news, and “plutoed” — meaning “to be demoted or devalued” — was chosen as the 2006 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. “Pluto is smaller than our moon, not of planetary size,” astronomer Sir Patrick Moore said on CBS Evening News. “If we call Pluto a planet, there are others: Xena, Verona, Terran, Ceres — the list is endless. In fact, that makes no sense at all.” Alan Stern, the leader of NASA’s New Horizon mission to Pluto, said that he was “embarrassed for astronomy,” noting that fewer than 5 percent of the world’s astronomers (424 out of some 10,000) voted on the resolution. Stern also noted that the part of the definition about “clearing” the zone around its orbit made no sense, because Earth, Mars and Jupiter all travel closely alongside asteroids. “It won’t stand,” he concluded. “It’s a farce.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Richard Patterson/TV Guide/CBS/Courtesy: Everett Collection
Aug. 23: Richard Hatch wins first 'Survivor' (2000)
Survivor forever changed the television landscape, and the first season ended on Aug. 23, 2000, with 39-year-old corporate trainer Richard Hatch (who had a penchant for walking around the beach in Borneo in the nude) winning the million-dollar prize. In the final vote, Hatch beat runner-up Kelly Wiglesworth, a 23-year-old river guide from Las Vegas, 4-3. The episode is perhaps best remembered for the impassioned speech delivered by fourth-place finisher Sue Hawk in the final tribal council, which is considered one of the best moments of the franchise: “I plead to the jury tonight to think a little bit about the island that we have been on. This island is pretty much full of only two things: snakes and rats. And in the end of Mother Nature, we have Richard the snake, who knowingly went after prey, and Kelly, who turned into the rat that ran around like the rats do on this island, trying to run from the snake. I feel we owe it to the island’s spirits that we have learned to come to know to let it be in the end the way that Mother Nature intended it to be. For the snake to eat the rat.” Some 51.7 million Americans tuned into the two-hour finale, making it the year’s second most watched show after the Super Bowl, which had 88.4 million viewers. Hatch was found guilty in 2006 of tax evasion and spent three years in prison, ultimately getting nine months tacked on to his sentence because he failed to pay taxes on his winnings. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: ELG/AP Photo
Aug. 22: Nolan Ryan reaches 5,000 strikeouts (1989)
The Texas Rangers’ Nolan Ryan became the first pitcher in major league history to attain 5,000 strikeouts when he struck out future Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson of the Oakland A’s on Aug. 22, 1989. After the game, Henderson said, “It was an honor to be the 5,000th. As Davey Lopes says, ‘If he ain’t struck you out, you ain’t nobody.’” Ryan would stay in the major leagues for an astounding (and record-tying) 27 years. He started in 1966, during the Johnson administration, and retired in 1993, at age 46, during the Clinton presidency. He ended his career with 5,714 strikeouts, 839 more than the runner-up, Randy Johnson. During his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1999, Ryan said, “My ability to throw a baseball was a gift — a God-given gift — and I truly am appreciative of that gift. It took me a while to figure that out and realize what a gift I had been given, and when I finally did, I dedicated myself to be the best pitcher that I possibly could for as long as I possibly could.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images
Aug. 21: The rebuilt Globe Theatre opens (1996)
Shakespeare’s original Globe Theatre opened in 1599, was destroyed by fire (caused by a misfired prop cannon during Henry VIII) in 1613, was rebuilt but shut down by parliamentary decree in 1642 and then was finally torn down in 1644. For nearly 350 years, London was without a Globe, until the 1970s, when American actor-director Sam Wanamaker set up a trust with the goal of reconstructing the historic theater. With the help of architect Theo Crosby, the team chose a spot right near the original location, just one block closer to the River Thames. And they set out to make the building as historically accurate as possible, using the same wood (green oak), mimicking the open-to-the-sky design and even using a thatched roof — though this roof must, by law, be lined with period-inappropriate fire-retardant material. While the Globe officially reopened in 1997, with an appearance by Queen Elizabeth II, there was a so-called prologue season the summer prior, which kicked off with a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, starring future Tony and Oscar winner Mark Rylance. “While the Globe looks unprepossessingly artificial from the outside, especially surrounded by a dreary cluster of buildings that weren’t there in Shakespeare’s day, the theater itself is a treat,” critic Matt Wolf wrote in Variety at the time. “Whether one is a ‘groundling’ on his feet throughout or is seated on backless benches above (cushions can be rented), the theater induces a very real camaraderie that no amount of money can buy.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images
Aug. 20: 'Viking 1,' heads to Mars (1975)
On this day in 1975, NASA launched its Viking 1 orbiter and lander, which would go on to become the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the surface of Mars almost a year later, on July 20, 1976. As part of a $1 billion program, the launch had been scheduled to take place on Aug. 11, but it was delayed due to a problem with the launch vehicle’s steering mechanism and then once again when the two batteries aboard the orbiter were accidentally drained. Unfortunately, that snafu put a damper on plans to have the spacecraft land on July 4, 1976 — the country’s bicentennial. But as NASA administrator James C. Fletcher said at a news conference: “I have told my people not to put a high priority on a July 4 landing. The mission is too important to rush and risk something going wrong.” In the end, the eventual July 20 landing date was special in its own way: It fell on the seventh anniversary of the day Apollo 11 touched down on the surface of the moon. On the day of the landing, President Gerald R. Ford called NASA to congratulate the team. “I think it’s amazing to think that in the span of a single lifetime, the exploration of air and space has grown from the dreams of a very, very few individuals to such a massive, cooperative reality. We have gone from a flight of a few seconds and a few hundred feet for a yearlong journey to Mars, crossing some 440 million miles,” Ford said. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gregg DeGuire/FilmMagic via Getty Images
Aug. 19: Lady Gaga releases 'The Fame' (2008)
On this date in 2008, avant-garde pop songstress Lady Gaga released her debut album The Fame, which was buoyed by the success of its lead single “Just Dance.” While critical response was generally mixed on her first outing, most reviewers recognized Gaga’s star potential. In his review for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis wrote: “As pop albums go, it has an impressively high strike rate. Bar a couple of grisly piano ballads, virtually everything on The Fame arrives packing an immensely addictive melody or an inescapable hook; virtually everything sounds like another hit single.” Indeed, after the success of “Just Dance,” the album spawned three more singles in the States, “LoveGame,” “Paparazzi,” and “Poker Face,” the latter of which hit number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Fame spent 273 weeks on the Billboard 200 album charts, eventually peaking at number 2 in January 2010, and it also went on to kick-start Gaga’s reign as a Grammy darling. The album earned her five Grammy nominations, including for album of the year and song of the year (for “Poker Face”), and she nabbed two wins for best dance recording and electronic/dance album. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Henry Diltz/Corbis via Getty Images
Aug. 18: Jimi Hendrix closes out Woodstock (1969)
When rock god Jimi Hendrix signed his contract to appear at Woodstock, he was booked as a headliner and stipulated that he must be the last musical act to perform. While he was originally scheduled to appear on Sunday night, the preceding acts went long — really long — and Hendrix and his newly formed band, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, didn’t hit the stage until Monday morning at about 9 a.m. Festival crowds had maxed out at over half a million music lovers the night before, but by the time the sun rose on Monday, there were only 30,000 to 40,000 fans left in the soggy alfalfa field. As part of their two-hour set, Hendrix and company tore through hits like “Red House” and “Foxy Lady” before he performed his legendary interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which blared with feedback and distortion. “I remember people literally tearing their hair out,” said documentarian Michael Wadleigh. “I looked out with one eye, and I saw people grabbing their heads, so ecstatic, so stunned and moved, a lot of people holding their breath, including me. No one had ever heard that. It caught all of us by surprise.” Hendrix finished out his set with “Purple Haze,” followed by a lengthy instrumental jam session and then “Villanova Junction,” before he closed out with an encore of “Hey Joe.” And with that, the festival was over. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Martin Bureau/AFP via Getty Images
Aug. 17: Phelps wins eight gold medals (2008)
On Aug. 17, at the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, swimmer Michael Phelps picked up his eighth gold medal of that Olympics cycle, breaking a record for the most gold medals won in a single year. Phelps had tied the seven-golds-in-a-single-Games record set by Mark Spitz at the 1972 Munich Games when he won the 100-meter butterfly by 0.01 seconds, and lucky number eight came with the team event, the 400-meter medley relay. “Records are always made to be broken, no matter what they are,” he told reporters after his historic win. “Anybody can do anything they set their mind to.” And when asked what he was most excited to do next, he replied: “What I’m looking forward to is not doing anything. Just sitting and not moving.” President George W. Bush called Phelps from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and told him, “If you can handle eight gold medals, you can handle anything.” Bush also said that his wife, Laura, and he were proud of how he handled himself with “humility.” But Phelps, who was only 23 during the Beijing Games, was only getting started: He went on to compete in London in 2012 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016, eventually going on to win a record-breaking 23 gold medals, out of 28 total medals. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: AP Photo
Aug. 16: Elvis Presley dies of a heart attack (1977)
Forty-five years ago today, at the age of 42, Elvis Presley was found unconscious in his home at Graceland, at 2:30 p.m., by his fiancée Ginger Alden. “I stood paralyzed as I took in the scene,” Alden wrote in her 2014 memoir, Elvis and Ginger. “Elvis looked as if his entire body had completely frozen in a seated position while using the commode and then had fallen forward, in that fixed position, directly in front of it.” Presley was rushed to Memphis’ Baptist Memorial Hospital, but doctors couldn’t revive him, and the King was officially declared dead about an hour later. After a two-hour examination of his body, the Shelby County coroner, Jerry Francisco, M.D., announced his preliminary autopsy report, listing the cause of death as “cardiac arrhythmia,” or an irregular and ineffective heartbeat. A toxicology report was conducted, and when the results came back a few weeks later, Presley’s blood was shown to contain high levels of the opiates Dilaudid, Percodan, Demerol and codeine, plus quaaludes, and pathologists found evidence that he had suffered from severe constipation, diabetes and glaucoma. In his obituary for Time magazine, music critic Jay Cocks wrote, “So the legend goes: Nothing kills America’s culture heroes as quickly and surely as success. Presley burnt himself out, as if on schedule. He had been thirsty for glory.” The rock legend was buried on the property at Graceland, near the graves of his mother, Gladys; his father, Vernon; and his grandmother, Minnie Mae Hood Presley. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: AP Photo
Aug. 15: The Beatles play at Shea Stadium (1965)
On this date in 1965, the Beatles invented the concept of a stadium concert when they played for a record-setting crowd of 55,600 at New York’s Shea Stadium. After a few opening acts, Ed Sullivan introduced the Fab Four by saying, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, honored by their country, decorated by their queen, loved here in America, here are the Beatles!” They took the stage at 9:16 p.m. and ripped through a 12-song set list that included “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” The concert was recorded for a 50-minute television special, The Beatles at Shea Stadium, that aired the following year on the BBC. But even more than the music, the show is best remembered for its technical problems and the frenzied crowd (which included a young Meryl Streep among its ranks!). When the specially designed amplifiers couldn’t compete with the roar of the crowd, the band hooked up to the stadium’s PA system, which kept them from being able to hear themselves play. Murray Schumach of The New York Times wrote the next day about the crowd: “Their immature lungs produced a sound so staggering, so massive, so shrill and sustained that it crossed the line from enthusiasm into hysteria and was soon in the area of the classic meaning of the word pandemonium — the region of all demons.” To control the hordes, 2,000 security guards had been hired — but members of the crowd still managed to break through the barriers and storm the stage. It was such a religious experience for the fans that some even begged the police to give them blades of grass from the parts of the field where John, Paul, George and Ringo had walked. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo
August 14: U.S. Embassy in Havana reopens (2015)
One of President Barack Obama’s goals for his second term was to normalize diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, and perhaps the most symbolically important moment came on August 14, 2015, when the American flag was raised over the U.S. embassy in Havana for the first time in 54 years. America hadn’t had an embassy in Cuba since President Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in 1961. To mark the occasion, John Kerry flew down to Havana for the ceremony, becoming the first secretary of state to visit Cuba in more than seven decades and the highest-ranking American official to set foot on the island since the 1959 revolution. Also on hand were the three Marines who had lowered the Stars and Stripes all those years ago, in 1961. In a symbolic gesture, they handed off the flag to their younger counterparts. “My friends, it doesn’t take a GPS to realize that the road of mutual isolation and estrangement that the United States and Cuba were traveling was not the right one and that the time has come for us to move in a more promising direction,” Senator Kerry said to the crowd of assembled U.S. and Cuban officials. “In the United States, that means recognizing that U.S. policy is not the anvil on which Cuba’s future will be forged.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Bob Riha Jr./Getty Images
August 13: 'South Park' debuts on TV (1997)
On this date 25 years ago, Trey Parker and Matt Stone premiered their gleefully raunchy adult cartoon, South Park. The Comedy Central series followed the foul-mouthed antics of four friends — Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski and Kenny McCormick — and the assorted citizens of their fictional Colorado town. The first episode, which has a too-vulgar-to-print title, saw Cartman getting abducted by aliens, and critics were less than impressed with the writing and animation. In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, Miles Beller wrote off South Park as “dismissible juvenilia — a collection of poorly paced, lowest-common-denominator setups that are not even sophomorically funny or scatologically goofy.” He continued, “Rendered in the wanting style of a cheesy, early 1960s cartoon, South Park is a witless offering that wants to score as it seeks to be pointedly outrageous and aggressively offensive but clocks in as merely dumb.” Conservative columnist L. Brent Bozell III, meanwhile, called it “so offensive that it shouldn’t have been made, period. It doesn’t just push the envelope; it knocks it off the table.” Nevertheless, Parker and Stone had the last laugh, as the episode pulled in a Nielsen rating of 1.3, representing about 980,000 viewers — an impressive number for cable TV at that time. Even more impressive is how critics have come to embrace the show over the years: It’s gone on to receive 18 Emmy nominations and is still going strong after 25 seasons. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
August 12: Sue the T. Rex skeleton is found (1990)
It was August 1990, and marine archaeologist Susan Hendrickson and paleontologist Peter Larson were searching for fossils on a cattle ranch on South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux reservation. On the morning of the 12th, the team was getting ready to leave when a flat tire halted their plans. As her fellow fossil hunters went for help, Hendrickson decided to continue her hunt in a nearby cliffside, where she happened upon a surprising find: the most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered. At first, Hendrickson spotted just a few vertebrae sticking out of a bluff. But after a team of six had worked for 17 days, they came away with a nearly 90 percent complete T. rex skeleton that comprised some 250 of approximately 380 known bones and was later named for the woman who discovered it. (Many people assume Sue was a female T. Rex, but scientists don’t know the dinosaur’s sex, so it now officially goes by they/them/their pronouns!) The specimen dates back some 67 million years and measures over 40 feet long and 13 feet tall at the hip. While the scientists paid the ranch owner, Maurice Williams, $5,000 for the right to excavate on his property, Sue’s discovery ultimately kicked off a decade-long custody battle that dragged in the U.S. Department of the Interior, the FBI and the Supreme Court. Sue ultimately went up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1997, and Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History made the winning bid of $8,362,500. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Antonio Ribeiro/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
August 11: The Mall of America opens (1992)
On this date, exactly 30 years ago, the Mall of America opened in Bloomington, Minnesota, with 330 stores and 10,000 employees. The $650 million shopping center was built in the Twin Cities suburbs on the site of the old Metropolitan Stadium, which both the Twins and the Vikings had moved out of a decade prior. In a 1992 article for The New York Times, Neal Karlen described the mega-mall as “a 78-acre full-sensory smorgasbord of consumerism,” and indeed, it’s hard to overstate just how massive it is: At its opening, it covered 4.2 million square feet, or the equivalent of 88 football fields’ worth of floor space, divided over four floors. Inside, the seven-acre Camp Snoopy theme park included 400 trees, 30,000 other plants, a mountain and a waterfall that cascaded down four floors; outside, the world’s largest parking garage included 13,000 spaces. The grand opening started with a bang, with Ray Charles earning a reported $50,000 to sing “America” on August 10. A day later, some 150,000 people streamed in to check it out for themselves, with more than a million visiting in the first week. To sum up the mega-mall’s appeal, look no further than jingle writer Robin Batteau’s theme song: “There’s a place for fun in your life, the Mall of America. You’ve got to see it to believe it. Who told you you can’t have it all?” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Brett Coomer/AP Photo
August 10: Yuri Malenchenko weds in space (2003)
On this date in 2003, Ukrainian-born Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko got married to Ekaterina Dmitriev, an American citizen living in Houston, in a ceremony at Texas’ Johnson Space Center. The only catch: While the bride, the 200 guests and the judge presiding over the ceremony were located at the NASA facility, Malenchenko was floating some 240 miles overhead, as the commander of the International Space Station mission! The couple exchanged their vows during a weekly scheduled family teleconference time, with an American lawyer on hand to officially sign the marriage documents for Malenchenko in his absence. The couple had decided to tie the knot remotely after the space shuttle Columbia exploded upon reentry, because they didn’t want to risk waiting for his safe return, according to their wedding planner, Jo Ann Schwartz Woodward. During the ceremony, Dmitriev stood next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Malenchenko in his space suit, on which had been affixed a bow tie; she wore a white dress and a jeweled tiara. Another astronaut on the ISS, Edward Lu, served as best man and played the wedding march on a portable keyboard. In a fun twist, the couple met at a party honoring the history-making first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin — who happens to be Malenchenko’s namesake. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: AP Photo
August 9: Gerald R. Ford is sworn in as president (1974)
In a solemn televised address on the evening of August 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon announced his plan to resign the presidency, telling the American people, “By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.” On the following day, just before noon, Nixon and his family boarded a helicopter on the White House lawn and made the long trip back to their home in San Clemente, California. Just a few minutes later, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger administered the oath of office to Vice President Gerald R. Ford in the East Room of the White House, officially making him the 38th president of the United States. “The oath that I have taken is the same oath that was taken by George Washington and by every President under the Constitution,” Ford said in his first address to the American people. “But I assume the presidency under extraordinary circumstances never before experienced by Americans. This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts.” The former Michigan congressman was already in an unprecedented position, having become the first vice president selected under the terms of the 25th Amendment, following the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Ford’s goal from the start was to restore civility and honor to politics, a sentiment perhaps best summed up by the most memorable line from his inaugural speech: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images
August 8: The Dream Team wins a gold medal (1992)
Prior to the 1992 Games, professional basketball players had been barred from representing their national teams at the Olympics, but a crucial vote finally changed all that, allowing current NBA players to compete. When the so-called Dream Team was assembled, it was so stacked with all-time greats that many journalists have called it the best team to ever play in any sport. Led by head coach Chuck Daly of the New Jersey Nets, the team included such heavy hitters as Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen and John Stockton, and they ended up beating each of their opponents by an average of 44 points per game. “It was like Elvis and the Beatles put together,” Daly said. “Traveling with the Dream Team was like traveling with 12 rock stars. That’s all I can compare it to.” On this date 30 years ago, in the final matchup of the Barcelona Olympics, the U.S. team routed the Croatians by a final score of 117 to 85, with Jordan leading the team in scoring: 22 points in 23 minutes. And that gold-medal win proved to be the final game in Larry Bird’s storied career, as he announced his retirement two weeks after returning to the United States, citing back injuries. “During the medal ceremony, they were like kids,” assistant coach Mike Krzyzewski later told GQ. “Here they had NBA championships and all that, but they were like kids. It was a beautiful moment.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Alan Welner/AP Photo
Aug. 7: Petit walks between the Twin Towers (1974)
A little after 7 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1974, 24-year-old French high-wire artist Philippe Petit pulled off an incredible feat: He walked on a tightrope stretched between the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, without a net, at 1,350 feet above street level. After months of planning, and with the help of an inside man who worked in the complex, Petit gained access to the towers. One of his collaborators had used a bow and arrow the night before to shoot a fishing line across the chasm, which then was used to feed a heavy cable across to the other tower. For 45 minutes, with his 26-foot-long balancing pole in hand, Petit crossed the cable eight times, and he did so with dramatic flourishes — lying on the wire, talking to seagulls, kneeling on one knee and saluting the sky. Upon finishing his stunt, which he called “le coup,” Petit was arrested by the Port Authority police, sent to a hospital for observation and charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct. A judge ultimately dropped the charges on the condition that Petit perform for children in Central Park. According to Petit, he had dreamed of pulling off this stunt since way back in 1968, when he first saw a drawing of the proposed Twin Towers while he was waiting in the dentist’s office. “If I see two towers, I have to walk,” he said. “Anything that is giant and manmade strikes me in an awesome way and calls me.” The daredevil act would go on to inspire the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire and the 2015 biopic The Walk, which starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Brad Barket/Getty Images for Comedy Central
Aug. 6: Jon Stewart finishes 'The Daily Show' (2015)
On this date in 2015, after 16 years on the air, Jon Stewart hosted his final episode of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and it came at a time of major shake-ups in the late-night space. Within a year, Chelsea Handler, Craig Ferguson, Stephen Colbert and David Letterman had all said goodbye to their long-running shows. For his final outing, Stewart chose to place the focus on his team of collaborators over the years, and the episode turned into a who’s who of previous correspondents, many of whom had gone on to robust careers of their own. Among those who showed up to bid Stewart farewell were Samantha Bee, Steve Carell, Lewis Black, Aasif Mandvi, Ed Helms, John Oliver and a slew of others. Then politicians and pundits got in on the action, with taped appearances from Bill O’Reilly, who called Stewart a “quitter”; John McCain, who teased, “So long, jackass!”; and Hillary Clinton, who said it was a “bummer” that Stewart was leaving just as her presidential run was ramping up. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed “Land of Hope and Dreams.” And then Stephen Colbert moved Stewart to tears with his compliments, saying, “You are infuriatingly good at your job!” In the final moments of the show, Stewart reminded the audience that the series wasn’t ending and would return soon with new host Trevor Noah: “We are merely taking a small pause in the conversation — a conversation which, by the way, I have hogged, and I apologize for that.” The following month, Stewart picked up the Emmy for outstanding variety talk series, and he joked during his acceptance speech: “Thank you so very much. You will never have to see me again.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Dirck Halstead/Getty Images
Aug. 5: Reagan fires air traffic controllers (1981)
On Aug. 3, 1981, nearly 13,000 of the nation’s air traffic controllers went on strike, when negotiations to raise wages and shorten their workweek stalled. The strike led to the cancellation of more than 7,000 flights, and President Ronald Reagan mentioned during a Rose Garden news conference that laws barred strikes by federal employees, who took an oath not to walk off their jobs. “It is for this reason that I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning that they are in violation of the law,” Reagan said. “And if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.” Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis added, “I don’t care whether it’s 9,000 or 12,000 or 100,000 — whoever is not at work will be fired.” On Aug. 5, Reagan made good on his promise by starting the process of firing an eventual 11,359 air traffic controllers, and the executive action impacted air travel across the United States for months. Reagan also instituted a lifetime ban on rehiring those who participated in the strike, and the FAA opened up applications for new hires on Aug. 17. Reagan’s move dealt a devastating blow to the labor movement in America, and NPR host Julia Simon summed up the impact as follows: “Reagan flipped the narrative on strikebreaking. Strikers were no longer the sympathetic ones. Now they were selfish lawbreakers screwing over regular Americans.” Soon, across America, companies were firing striking copper miners in Arizona, paper workers in Maine, as well as meat packers and bus drivers — and unions could no longer use strikes as a means of leverage. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Bill Becker/AP Photo
Aug. 4: Winfield accidentally kills a seagull (1983)
In one of the stranger tales in Major League Baseball history, the New York Yankees were playing a game at Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium, when 31-year-old outfielder Dave Winfield threw a warm-up ball in the middle of the fifth inning. The ball struck a seagull that had been sitting in right field, killing the bird, and fans responded by booing and throwing rubber balls at Winfield. A ball boy was sent out into the field to retrieve the carcass, which he covered with a towel. And when the Yankees returned to the locker room, they were shocked by the uproar in the stadium. Teammate Graig Nettles joked, “I could understand the fuss if it was a blue jay, but it was just a gate-crashing seagull.” But the authorities weren’t laughing: After the game, Winfield was taken to a police station and charged with animal cruelty. The Toronto Humane Society worked with the police on the investigation, and they submitted the bird’s body to the University of Guelph for a full autopsy. While Yankees shortstop Roy Smalley had joked that the headlines might read “Winfield Pleads Gull-ty,” the charges were ultimately dropped later that week, with Winfield telling reporters at Yankee Stadium: “I’ve been exonerated. I feel badly about it, but the Toronto police realize it was an accident.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Leo Mason/Popperfoto via Getty Images
Aug. 3: Mary Lou Retton wins at the Olympics (1984)
On this day in 1984, at the Los Angeles Summer Games, 16-year-old West Virginia native Mary Lou Retton beat the odds to become the first American woman to win the all-around gymnastics title at the Olympics. At just 4 feet 9 inches tall and 93 pounds, Retton had staged an impressive comeback from a knee surgery six weeks earlier. With two events to go, Retton trailed Romanian gymnast Ecaterina Szabo by 0.15 points, before she scored back-to-back perfect 10s in the floor exercise and vault, in front of a crowd of approximately 9,000 at the Pauley Pavilion. Her final score: 79.175 to Szabo’s 79.125. Upon her victory, her coach, Béla Károlyi, shouted, “We did it, Little Body! We did it! Unbelievable!” She told reporters of her performance on the vault: “I knew I’d stick it.” The newly crowned gold medalist would go on to celebrate at Disneyland and appear in a ticker-tape parade in New York, and then became the first female athlete to land the front of the Wheaties cereal box. By year’s end, Sports Illustrated named her Sportswoman of the Year. She recalled to writer Frank Deford about meeting her fans at the Olympic Village: “I mean, there were mobs of people. And the people knew me! They said things like, ‘Mary Lou, you’ve been in our home. You’ve been in our living room. We feel like we know you, Mary Lou!’ I still think it’s kind of neat too. I mean, I’d understand people recognizing me if I had purple hair or something. But I’m just a normal teenager. I’m still just Mary Lou.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Stephanie McGehee/AP Photo
Aug. 2: Iraqi forces invade Kuwait (1990)
In what would become the first major global crisis of the post–Cold War era, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent forces into neighboring Kuwait at about 2 a.m. on Aug. 2, 1990. Earlier that summer, tensions in the Persian Gulf had reached a boiling point, as Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait of exceeding oil export quotas and stealing oil from the Al-Rumaylah oil field. In the first 14 hours of the attack, Iraqis killed about 4,200 Kuwaitis in combat, and the emir and other government leaders fled to Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s motives were immediately clear: With the annexation of Kuwait — which they’d later declare as the 19th province of Iraq — Saddam Hussein now controlled 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves and gained access to a significant portion of the Persian Gulf coastline. On Aug. 3, Kuwait Radio signed off at 11:11 a.m. with the message: “Arabs, brothers, beloved brothers, Muslims. Hurry to our aid.” The international response was swift, and on Aug. 6, the U.N. Security Council demanded the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait and imposed a ban on trade with Saddam Hussein’s regime. Within a week of the invasion, U.S. armed forces were beginning Operation Desert Shield, a defense of Saudi Arabia to keep the Iraqis from advancing farther, and they followed that up in January 1991 with Operation Desert Storm, the combat phase to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Patti McConville / Alamy Stock Photo
Aug. 1: Martin publishes 'A Game of Thrones' (1996)
“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.” So begins the mysterious prologue of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, an epic fantasy that was released on this date in 1996, kicking off the series A Song of Ice and Fire — which would later inspire one of the biggest hits in television history. After a decade or so in Hollywood, in which he worked as a writer and producer, Martin began writing novels once again. He later told Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times: “When I returned to prose, which had been my first love, in the ’90s, I said I’m going to do something that is just as big as I want to do. I can have all the special effects I want. I can have a cast of characters that numbers in the hundreds. I can have giant battle scenes. Everything you can’t do in television and film, of course you can do in prose because you’re everything there. You’re the director, you’re the special effects coordinator, you’re the costume department, and you don’t have to worry about a budget.” The book won the 1997 Locus Award for best fantasy novel, and it went on to top the New York Times Best Sellers list in July 2011. That same year, it provided the inspiration for HBO’s Game of Thrones (minus the “A” at the beginning), which became an Emmy-winning juggernaut and a ratings powerhouse. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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