• August 1 – Clergy Sexual Abuse US and International
• August 6 – National Fresh Breath Day
• August 6 – National Wiggle Your Toes Day
• August 7 – Purple Heart Day
• August 8 – Happiness Happens Day
• August 8 – Severe ME Awareness Day (Severe & Very Severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis).
• August 9 – International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples
• August 12 – International Youth Day
• August 13 – International Left-handers Day
• August 19 – World Humanitarian Day
• August 20 – National Honey Bee Day
• August 21 – National Senior Citizens Day
• August 30 – International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances
• August 31 – International Overdose

1485 – The War of the Roses ended with the death of England’s King Richard III. He was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field. His successor was Henry V II.

1567 – The “Council of Blood” was established by the Duke of Alba. This was the beginning of his reign of terror in the Netherlands.

1642 – The English Civil War began when Charles I called Parliament and its soldiers traitors.

1762 – Ann Franklin became the editor of the Mercury of Newport in Rhode Island. She was the first female editor of an American newspaper.

1770 – Australia was claimed under the British crown when Captain James Cook landed there.

1775 – The American colonies were proclaimed to be in a state of open rebellion by England’s King George III.

1846 – The U.S. annexed New Mexico.

1851 – The schooner America outraced the Aurora off the English coast to win a trophy that became known as the America’s Cup.

1865 – A patent for liquid soap was issued to William Sheppard.

1902 – In Hartford, CT, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt became the first president of the United States to ride in an automobile.

1906 – The Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, NJ began to manufacture the Victrola. The hand-cranked unit, with horn cabinet, sold for $200.

1910 – Japan formally annexed Korea.

1911 – It was announced that Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” had been stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris. The painting reappeared two years later in Italy.

1932 – The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) began its first TV broadcast in England.

1941 – Nazi troops reached the outskirts of Leningrad during World War II.

1950 – Althea Gibson became the first black tennis player to be accepted into a national competition.

1951 – 75,052 people watched the Harlem Globetrotters perform. It was the largest crowd to see a basketball game. 

1959 – Stephen Rockefeller married Anne Marie Rasmussen. Anne had once been a maid for the powerful and wealthy Rockefeller family.

1968 – Pope Paul VI arrived in Bogota, Colombia, for the start of the first papal visit to Latin America.

1972 – Due to its racial policies, Rhodesia was asked to withdraw from the 20th Olympic Summer Games. 

1973 – Henry Kissinger was named Secretary of State by U.S. President Nixon. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year.

1984 – The last Volkswagen Rabbit rolled off the assembly line in New Stanton, PA.

1986 – Kerr-McGee Corp. agreed to pay the estate of the late Karen Silkwood $1.38 million to settle a 10-year-old nuclear contamination lawsuit.

1989 – Nolan Ryan became the first major league pitcher to strike out 5000 batters. (MLB)

1990 – U.S. President George H.W. Bush signed an order for calling reservists to aid in the build up of troops in the Persian Gulf.

1990 – The U.S. State Department announced that the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait would not be closed under President Saddam Hussein’s demand.

1990 – Angry smokers blocked a street in Moscow to protest the summer-long cigarette shortage.

1991 – It was announced by Yugoslavia that a truce ordered on August 7th with Croatia had collapsed.

1991 – Mikhail S. Gorbachev returned to Moscow after the collapse of the hard-liners’ coup. On the same day he purged the men that had tried to oust him.

1992 – In Rostock, Germany, neo-Nazi violence broke out against foreigners.

1996 – U.S. President Clinton signed legislation that ended guaranteed cash payments to the poor and demanded work from recipients.

2004 – In Oslo, Norway, a version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and his work “Madonna” were stolen from the Munch Museum. This version of “The Scream,” one of four different versions, was a tempera painting on board.

On August 21, 1863, a Confederate guerilla group led by William Quantrill attacked citizens in the town of Lawrence, Kansas, during the American Civil War. Guerillas killed more than 150 boys and men and burned much of the town. The Lawrence Massacre, also known as Quantrill’s raid, was a culmination of tension between local abolitionists and pro-slavery partisans along the Missouri-Kansas border. These border tensions had been brewing for some time. Beginning in 1855, pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers engaged in a series of violent confrontations and political killings over whether Kansas would be a free state or a slave state, leading to a border war known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Lawrence was founded along the Oregon Trail on the homelands of the Kaw, Lakota, Osage, and Kikapoo by New Englanders. Considered the anti-slavery capital, Lawrence was well-known as a stronghold for abolitionists and the Free-State movement. Continue reading…

Source: Fold3.com

Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence

By Kristen Epps, University of Central Arkansas

William Quantrill’s raid on the Free-State town of Lawrence, Kansas (also known as the Lawrence Massacre) was a defining moment in the border conflict. At dawn on August 21, 1863, Quantrill and his guerrillas rode into Lawrence, where they burned much of the town and killed between 160 and 190 men and boys. This raid was the culmination of an ongoing conflict between the Free-State forces who controlled Lawrence and the proslavery partisans who lived in nearby Missouri. Although Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861, ending the period called “Bleeding Kansas,” the animosities of the territorial period lived on with the outbreak of civil war that same year.

On that fateful August morning, a group of roughly 400 Confederate guerrillas entered the sleeping town. They immediately began to ransack homes, shoot civilians, loot stores, and set fire to buildings (including the prominent Eldridge Hotel, although Quantrill allowed its inhabitants to evacuate safely). One of the first casualties was Reverend Snyder, shot as he was milking his cow outside his home along present-day East 19th Street. Mayor George Collamore, upon hearing the commotion, hid in his family’s well, where he died of smoke inhalation. The rest of his family survived, although they had lost their home and the raiders severely wounded his 18-year-old son.

George Ellis, a free black man, had risen early to finish some work on his family’s farm. The raiders killed George’s father, but George, his brother Ben, and his mother Jane managed to survive. George hid in a dense thicket near the Kansas River, and after Quantrill’s men set the house afire, Jane successfully dragged Ben out of the flames and concealed him underneath a feather bed. In addition to targeting African Americans, the raiders also inquired about the whereabouts of notorious Free-State leaders like James H. Lane, who was able to hide in a West Lawrence cornfield to escape detection, along with several of his neighbors.

The state governor and a leader of the Free-State movement, Charles Robinson, was lucky enough to escape with his life as well.

For the complete article … use he url below

Sources:

civilwaronthewesternborder.org onthisday.com

~ It was called the Quantrill Raid, but truth is they targeted African Americans in Lawrence and the Massacre included Blacks and Whites because Lawrence was a Free-State

… Things we didn’t learn in History Class! ~Nativegrl77