Today in History – 08/20/2011

1641 - Scotland and Britain signed the Treaty of Pacification.

1741 - Danish navigator Vitus Jonas Bering discovered Alaska.

1866 - It was formally declared by U.S. President Andrew Johnson that the American Civil War was over. The fighting had stopped months earlier.

1882 - Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" debuted in Moscow.

1914 - German forces occupied Brussels, Belgium, during World War I.

1918 - The British opened its Western Front offensive during World War I.

1923 - The first American dirigible, the "Shenandoah," was launched in Lakehurst, NJ. The ship began its maiden voyage from the same locatoin on September 4.

1940 - France fell to the Germans during World War II.

1945 - Tommy Brown of the Brooklyn Dodgers became the youngest player to hit a home run in a major league ball game. Brown was 17 years, 8 months and 14 days old.

1949 - Cleveland’s Indians and Chicago’s White Sox played at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland before the largest crowd, 78,382 people, to see a nighttime major-league baseball game.

1953 - It was announced by the Soviet Union that they had detonated a hydrogen bomb.

1955 - Col. Horace A. Hanes, a U.S. Air Force pilot, flew to an altitude of 40,000 feet. Hanes reached a speed of 822.135 miles per hour in a Super Sabrejet.

1964 - A $1 billion anti-poverty measure was signed by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson.

1968 - The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations began invading Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" liberalization.

1977 - Voyager 2 was launched by the United States. The spacecraft was carrying a 12 inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature.

1986 - Patrick Henry Sherril, postal employee, killed 14 co-workers in a shooting spree at the post office in Edmond, OK.
1988 - Eight British soldiers were killed by a landmine while in a military bus in Northern Ireland. The mine belonged to the Irish Republican Army.

1991 - A rally of more that 100,000 people occurred outside the Russian parliament building to protest the coup that removed Gorbachev from power.

1998 - Canada's Supreme Court announced that Quebec could not secede without the federal government's consent.

1998 - U.S. military forces attacked a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a chemical plant in Sudan. Both targets were chosen for cruise missile strikes due to their connection with Osama bin Laden.

1998 - The U.N. Security Council extended trade sanctions against Iraq for blocking arms inspections.

from On-This- Day.com