August 31


Today's:




1823 - Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne of Spain when invited French forces entered Cadiz. The event is known as the Battle of Trocadero.

1852 - The first pre-stamped envelopes were created with legislation of the U.S. Congress.

1881 - The first tennis championships in the U.S. were played.

1887 - The kinetoscope was patented by Thomas Edison. The device was used to produce moving pictures.

1920 - The first news program to be broadcast on radio was aired. The station was 8MK in Detroit, MI.

1920 - John Lloyd Wright was issued a patent for "Toy-Cabin Construction," which are known as Lincoln Logs. (U.S. patent 1,351,086)

1935 - The act of exporting U.S. arms to belligerents was prohibited by an act signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1940 - Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh were married.

1941 - The radio program "The Great Gildersleeve" made its debut on NBC.

1946 - Superman returned to radio on the Mutual Broadcasting System after being dropped earlier in the year.

1950 - Gil Hodges of the Brooklyn Dodgers hit four home runs in a single game off of four different pitchers.

1959 - Sandy Koufax set a National League record by striking out 18 batters.

1962 - The Caribbean nations Tobago and Trinidad became independent within the British Commonwealth.

1964 - California officially became the most populated state in America.

1965 - The Department of Housing and Urban Development was created by the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

1980 - Poland's Solidarity labor movement was born with an agreement signed in Gdansk that ended a 17-day strike.







1981 - The 30-year contract between Milton Berle and NBC-TV expired.

1989 - Great Britain's Princess Anne and Mark Phillips announced that they were separating. The marriage was 16 years old.

1990 - U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar met with the Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to try and negotiate a solution to the crisis in the Persian Gulf.

1990 - East and West Germany signed a treaty that meant the harmonizing of political and legal systems.

1991 - Uzbekistan and Kirghiziz declared their independence from the Soviet Union. They were the 9th and 10th republics to announce their plans to secede.

1991 - In a "Solidarity Day" protest hundreds of thousands of union members marched in Washington, DC.

1993 - Russia withdrew its last soldiers from Lithuania.

1994 - A cease-fire was declared by the Irish Republican Army after 25 years of bloodshed in Northern Ireland.

1994 - Russia officially ended its military presence in the former East Germany and the Baltics after a half-century.

1998 - A ballistic missile was fired over Japan by North Korea. The missile landed in stages in the waters around Japan. There was no known target.
















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