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On an August 06:
2002 Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, de 72 años, jura a la presidencia de Bolivia, a la que vuelve después de cinco años, después de ganar las elecciones de junio y su ratificación en el Congreso. Su acompañante de fórmula Carlos Mesa, en su condición de vicepresidente de la nación es presidente del Congreso. La ceremonia tuvo lugar ante la representación parlamentaria más diversa y enfrentada que haya conocido el Poder Legislativo. El presidente saliente es Jorge Quiroga.
2002 At the Trevi fountain in Rome, waiting police arrest Roberto Cercelletta, after he arrives at 05:30 and, as he has for years, gathers the coins he finds there. Thousands of tourists stand with their backs to the Renaissance masterpiece and throw coins over their shoulders into the fountain, at the feet of Neptune, every day in the hope they will return to Rome. Cercelletta this day gets 22 kg of coins worth about $1000. In the slow tourist season he gets less, but it is estimated that charities, which are supposed to get the money, are losing some $12'000 a month. Cercelletta has been fined him in the past, but because he is homeless and unemployed, he has gotten away without paying. But recent media attention led police to make the arrest.
2002 Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena, of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, present a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm that determines whether an input number is prime or composite: http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/news/primality.pdf
2001 Hugo Banzer, 75, resigns his office of President of Bolivia one year before the end of his 5-year term, because of cancer. He took a few days off from chemoterapy in the US to go to Bolivia for the transfer of power to Vice President Jorge Quiroga, 41, who will be constitutionally barred from running for president in the summer of 2002. Banzer was dictator from 1971 to 1978, and ran in every democratic election of the 1980s and 1990s until he was finally elected president in 1997 with just 20% of the vote.
1998 The “Egyptian Jihad” sends a warning: they will soon deliver a message to Americans "which we hope they read with care, because we will write it, with God's help, in a language they will understand." (the “message” comes the next day)
1997 Microsoft buys a piece of Apple      ^top^
      Microsoft pays $150 million for a minority stake in its struggling rival, Apple Computers. This made sense for Apple, which was veritably squashed by Microsoft in the race to dominate the home computing market. The deal helps Apple on Wall Street, initially sending the company’s stock up $6.5625, to close at its highest price in over a year.
      The real questions concerned Microsoft’s motives, though the investment, which was for a nonvoting stake in the company, was seemingly a pragmatic business move. After all, Microsoft was, and remains to be, the largest seller of various software programs for Macintosh computers. The investment had other perks as well, including the provision that made Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s software for tooling about the World Wide Web, the standard browser on Macintosh personal computers.
      Of course, the deal had its detractors. When Microsoft’s investment was announced at the Macworld tradeshow in Boston, the room burst into a chorus of boos. Apple honcho Steve Jobs, who but a year ago had accused Microsoft of making “really third-rate products,” chided the audience. "We want to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We better treat Microsoft with a little gratitude." Job’s appreciation seemingly hasn’t been misplaced: since Microsoft’s investment, Apple has staged something of a comeback, with their balance sheet making a consistent return to the black.
1997 UUNet announces its zero-tolerance policy for junk e-mail and marketing messages on Usenet newsgroups. Administrators, responding to users' frustration with the amount of marketing e-mail on Usenet groups, had recently blocked most UUNet users from posting any messages whatsoever on Usenet groups.
1996 Chechen patriots retake Grozny from the Russian aggresssors.
1995 Ciudades del mundo aprovechan la conmemoración del 50 aniversario de la catástrofe de Hiroshima y Nagasaki para protestar contra la reanudación de los ensayos nucleares en el Pacífico por parte de Francia.
1995 Reconquistada Petrinja, el Gobierno croata proclama el restablecimiento de su soberanía sobre Krajina: 118 croatas muertos, 620 heridos y 12.000 prisioneros de guerra krajineses.
1993 Con la elección del candidato de la oposición Morihiro Hosokawa como primer ministro, la Dieta del Japón pone fin a 38 años de poder del Partido Liberal Demócrata.
1993 Tie-breaking VP vote passes Clinton's budget in the US Senate. The score was 50 to 50 until Al Gore casts the deciding vote.
1992 The Federal Communications Commission votes to allow Cox Enterprises and Telecommunications to purchase Merrill Lynch's teleport unit. The move signals the FCC's intention to allow cable television companies to provide phone services. The policy clears the way for the development of cable modems in the mid-1990s.
1991 Peugeot SA announces its withdrawal from the United States market, due to lagging sales. The major French automotive manufacturer and holding company has been in existence since 1896 and is presently headquartered in Paris.
1991 World Wide Web source files posted on the Internet      ^top^
      Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his experimental World Wide Web project on the Internet. Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist on fellowship at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland) had been working on a hypertext system allowing documents to "link" to each other easily. By 1990, he had created the basic parameters of the World Wide Web, and a working version was posted on CERN's internal computers in May 1991. On 06 August 16, 19, and 22, Berners-Lee releases Web files and requests input from other developers. By late 1991 and early 1992, the Web was widely discussed, and in early 1993, when Marc Andersen and other graduate students at the University of Illinois released the Mosaic browser (Netscape's precursor), the Web rapidly became a popular communications medium.
1990 UN Security Council votes 13-0 (2 abstentions Cuba & Yemen) economic sanctions against Iraq.
1990 Benazir Bhutto government dismissed by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan of India.      ^top^
     He also dissolves the National Assembly as well as the Sindh and North-West Frontier Province provincial assemblies, and appoints a caretaker government headed by Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, the leader of the Combined Opposition Parties in the National Assembly. In accordance with the constitution, the president schedules national and provincial elections for October 1990.
      Ishaq Khan claims that his actions are justified because of corruption, incompetence, and inaction; the release of convicted criminals under the guise of freeing political prisoners; a failure to maintain law and order in Sindh; and the use of official government machinery to promote partisan interests. A nationwide state of emergency is declared, citing both "external aggression and internal disturbance."
      Benazir calls her dismissal "illegal, unconstitutional, and arbitrary" and implies that the military is responsible. She adds that, to avoid giving Ghulam Ishaq Khan's regime's any pretext for not holding scheduled elections, the PPP (Pakistan People's Party) will not take to the streets. The military proclaims that its only interest is in maintaining order.
The Caretaker Government of Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi
      Ironically, Benazir's successor, the caretaker prime minister, is one of Pakistan's largest landowners, also from Benazir's Sindh Province. Jatoi had joined the PPP when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had founded it in the late 1960s, was in Bhutto's first cabinet, and was later chief minister of Sindh until Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in 1977. Jatoi had remained supportive of the PPP during the martial law period and had spearheaded the campaign organized by the MRD against Zia's government.
      Following Benazir's return to Pakistan in 1986, however, Jatoi was removed as chairman of the Sindh PPP and subsequently formed his own political organization, the National People's Party. Known as a moderate, Jatoi said that his party's objective was to make Pakistan a modern, democratic, and progressive Islamic welfare state. The Accountabilities Jatoi's caretaker government instituted accountability proceedings against persons charged with corruption and, under the authority of laws enacted by both the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the Zia regimes, set up special courts to handle accountability cases.
      The accountability process had traditionally been used to disqualify from public office those found guilty of corruption and wrongdoing. It had also been used as a weapon by politicians in power against their opponents. The period for accountability defined by the Jatoi government was limited to the twenty months of Benazir's regime. The PPP demand that Nawaz Sharif's Punjab government during that same time be subjected to similar scrutiny was rejected. Nevertheless, the Jatoi government defended the proceedings as fair and neutral. Although several charges were brought against Benazir, and her appearance before the accountability tribunals was required, she remained free and was able to lead her party in the October 1990 elections.
The Elections
      The Central Election Commission, consisting of three members of the senior judiciary, supervised preparation of the electoral rolls and the conduct of the 1990 elections as well as processing complaints and issuing reports. Although Pakistan has a large number of political parties, the two main contenders in the elections were both broad-based coalitions. One contender was the Pakistan Democratic Alliance, established during the campaign by Benazir's dominant PPP, together with the Tehrik-i-Istiqlal, headed by Asghar Khan, and two smaller parties. Asghar Khan had been Pakistan's first commander in chief of the air force and later became chairman of Pakistan International Airlines, before entering the political arena in 1969 and founding his own party.
      In the 1970s, Asghar Khan was one of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's harshest critics. Having helped to oust Bhutto, however, he did not benefit from the Zia military government, and in 1989 he resigned as Tehrik-i-Istiqlal's chairman. Political observers were surprised when the party joined the Pakistan Democratic Alliance.
      The other major contender in opposition to the Pakistan Democratic Alliance was the IJI, the coalition that had also competed with the PPP in the 1988 elections. The Pakistan Muslim League was a major component of the IJI, as was the Jamaat-i- Islami. The three chief competitors for leadership in the IJI and specifically in the Pakistan Muslim League were Nawaz Sharif, former Prime Minister Mohammad Khan Junejo, and Ejaz ul-Haq, son of the late President Zia ul-Haq.
      These three men represented key groups in Pakistan's political culture. Junejo belonged to a major Sindhi landowning family and represented the feudal classes. Ejaz appealed particularly to Zia's Islamic fundamentalist supporters. His candidacy was weakened, however, by his relative lack of political experience. Nawaz Sharif, the ultimate victor, represented the country's growing business classes. The caretaker prime minister also aspired to remain in power, but his party was not a member of the IJI, and so he lacked sufficient political strength.
      Other important parties included Altaf Hussain's MQM, representing the refugee community in urban Sindh, and Khan Abdul Wali Khan's Awami National Party, based in the Northwest Frontier Province and northern Balochistan. Although in 1990 the PDA and the IJI were the major election contenders in Pakistan's three largest provinces (Punjab, Sindh, and the Northwest Frontier Province), they had only a limited presence in the fourth province, Balochistan, where regional and religious parties, such as the Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Islam and the Jamhoori Watan Party, were of equal or even greater importance.
      The central campaign issue in 1990 for IJI was the Benazir government's alleged corruption and wrongdoing in office. The principal issue for the PDA was the alleged unconstitutionality of her dismissal from office and the subsequent treatment of her, and her family and associates, by the caretaker government. The campaign was heated, including incidents of violence, harassment, and political kidnappings. Media coverage played an active role.
      During this campaign, the government no longer held a monopoly on television news because a second network, People's Television Network (PTN), had been started, to compete with Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV). The new network introduced Cable News Network (CNN) in Pakistan. The PPP filed a complaint against PTV, charging biased network election coverage by it, but the complaint was rejected by the Lahore High Court. Print media coverage offered more variety. Although government-controlled newspapers tended to be anti-Benazir, the larger private sector of print media provided more diversity of opinion.
      Both the PDA and the IJI predicted victory, but at least one detailed public opinion poll gave the edge to the PDA. The election results were disastrous for the PDA, as the IJI won 105 of the 207 contested seats in the National Assembly. The PDA won only forty-five seats. The IJI attributed its victory to success in holding its coalition together as well as in establishing electoral alliances nationwide to ensure that PDA candidates would not run unopposed. The PDA blamed the defeat on alleged rigging of the elections. Although the elections were certainly not free of irregularities, observation teams both from inside the country and from outside, including a team from member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, concluded that the elections had been generally free and fair.
      Despite their problems, the 1990 elections were another step forward in the quest for political stability and democratic government. The constitutional transfer of power was achieved without direct military intervention.
The First Government of Nawaz Sharif
      When Mian Nawaz Sharif became prime minister in November 1990, his political coalition, the IJI, had more than a two- thirds majority in the National Assembly. The IJI alliance, a grouping of parties whose chief components were the PML and the JI, had been formed in 1988 to oppose the PPP in the elections of that year.
      In the 1988 elections, the PPP emerged as the single largest group in the National Assembly, and its leader, Benazir, became prime minister. At the same time, however, Nawaz Sharif emerged as the most powerful politician outside the PPP. Just two years later, the IJI under Nawaz Sharif's leadership achieved victory at the polls, and Nawaz Sharif took over in a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power — the third prime minister since Zia's death in 1988 ushered in a return to democracy.
      Nawaz Sharif's ascendancy also marked a transition in the political culture of Pakistan — a power shift from the traditional feudal aristocracy to a growing class of modern entrepreneurs. This transition mirrored the socioeconomic changes that had been at work in Pakistan, moving the country gradually from a feudal to an industrial society.
      Nawaz Sharif, born in Lahore in 1949, belongs to a post-independence generation of politicians. Scion of a leading industrial family, he is a practicing Muslim, an ardent capitalist, and a political moderate. A graduate of Government College Lahore, with a degree from Punjab University Law College, also in Lahore, he rose to prominence representing an urban constituency seeking its own political identity. His family, along with other major industrial families, had suffered from the nationalization of large industrial enterprises during Bhutto's regime (1971-77).
      Nawaz Sharif had worked to build a political constituency that would favor private industrial and commercial entrepreneurship. He served in Punjab, first as finance minister and then as chief minister, before coming to national office. As finance minister, he presented development-oriented budgets. As chief minister, he stressed welfare and development activities and the maintenance of law and order.
      In his first address to the nation after taking office as prime minister, Nawaz Sharif announced his government's comprehensive national reconstruction plan and said that its implementation would ensure the successful march of Pakistan into the twenty-first century. He stressed that proper use of the country's natural resources would be made, the pace of industrialization expedited, and the best use of talented manpower identified. Under his development policy, investment would be encouraged, and restrictions on setting up new industries would be lifted.
      Early assessments of Nawaz Sharif and his government noted his initiative, youthful energy, and already proven ability and popularity in his home province, the country's power base. The newspaper Dawn pointed out, however, that his Punjab connection was both an asset and a liability and that "to acquire a genuinely all-Pakistan stature, he will have to have ingenuity, and acumen, magnanimity and vision, and the strength to take bold decisions." Nawaz Sharif's cabinet initially included eighteen ministers: nine from Punjab, two from the Islamabad Capital Territory, six from Sindh, and one from Balochistan. His cabinet was later expanded to include representation from the Northwest Frontier Province.
      Of paramount importance to the new government was implementation of Nawaz Sharif's program for strengthening the economy. Goals of the program included self-reliance, deregulation and denationalization, taxation reform, foreign- exchange and payment reform, administrative and law reform, and increases in agricultural productivity and exports. The government's economic strategy rested on streamlining the institutional framework for industrialization and on starting a new partnership with the private sector in order to promote common objectives. Nawaz Sharif regarded unemployment as Pakistan's major problem and believed it could be solved only by rapid industrialization. He said his government was considering special incentives for rural industrialization and agro-based industries and was fully committed to a policy of deregulation.
     The IJI government was third in a line representing a dyarchical arrangement of shared power between Pakistan's civil- military and political forces. Nawaz Sharif and his predecessors, Junejo and Benazir, came to power under a constitutional framework in which, under the controversial Eighth Amendment introduced by Zia, the president was empowered to dissolve the parliament and dismiss the government. Both Junejo and Benazir had earlier been unceremoniously dismissed from office, and the constitutional framework limited Nawaz Sharif's ability to govern despite the support of a majority in the parliament. He, too, would be dismissed under the constitutional framework in 1993.
http://www.leisurecraft.com/pakview/History/History_Contents/Dmc_Process/dmc_process.htm
1989 Pilot Union tells pilots okay to cross Eastern picket lines
1988 Firebombing of the US Cultural Center in Kwangju, South Korea.
1986 Phil Katz releases PKARC version 1.0, for the IBM
1984 203.05 million shares traded in NY Stock Exchange
1983 Los partidos de oposición chilena forman la Alianza Democrática.
1971 Vietnam: US Army FIFO: first in, first out      ^top^
      The last remaining troops of the Fourth Battalion, 503rd Infantry of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, (the first US Army ground combat unit to arrive in Vietnam in May 1965), cease combat operations and begin preparations to leave Vietnam. The first US ground combat unit of any branch to reach Vietnam was the Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, which began arriving on March 8, 1965.
      The initial US combat forces were followed by a vast array of combat, combat support, and logistics units that together with US Navy and Air Force personnel in-country reached a peak of 543'400 in April 1969. In June 1969, President Richard Nixon gave the order, as part of his "Vietnamization" policy, which began the process of reducing American troop strength; the troop withdrawals began the following fall and continued until the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973.
1969 Vietnam: Green Berets charged with murder of double agent      ^top^
      The US Army announces that Colonel Robert B. Rheault, Commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group in Vietnam, and seven other Green Berets have been charged with premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the summary execution of a Vietnamese national, Thai Khac Chuyen, who had served as an agent for Detachment B-57.
      Chuyen was reportedly summarily executed for being a double agent who had compromised a secret mission. The case against the Green Berets was ultimately dismissed for reasons of national security when the Central Intelligence Agency refused to release highly classified information about the operations in which Detachment B-57 had been involved. Colonel Rheault subsequently retired from the Army.
1967 Se inaugura en Lisboa el Puente Salazar, sobre el Tajo, posteriormente llamado “del 25 de abril”, de 2278 metros de longitud.
1965 US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, outlawing the literacy test for voting eligibility in the South. The test had been abused to deny Blacks the vote.
1964 Vietnam: US president wants authority "to do what's needed."      ^top^
     Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk appear before a joint Congressional committee on foreign affairs to present the Johnson administration's arguments for a resolution authorizing the president "to take all necessary measures." The New York Stock Exchange, reacting to the news of the crisis in Vietnam, experiences its sharpest decline since the death of President Kennedy. Various rallies and peace vigils across the United States protest the bombing raids. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater said he supports President Johnson's retaliatory raids, but that he intends to make the whole question of Vietnam a campaign issue.
1962 Jamaica became an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth.
1959 Se declara ilegal el Partido Comunista en Argentina.
1944 Deportation of 70'000 Jews from Lodz Poland to Auschwitz begins
1942 The Soviet city of Voronezh falls to the German army.
1934 US troops leave Haiti, which had been occupied since 1915.
1927 Sacco and Vanzetti's final plea heard by a Massachusetts high court      ^top^
     On 09 April 1927, They had been sentenced to death for the murders in South Braintree, Mass., on 15 April 1920, of F.A. Parmenter, paymaster of a shoe factory, and Alessandro Berardelli, the guard accompanying him, in order to secure the payroll that they were carrying.
     "This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low or misfortunate creature of the earth — - I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already. I have finished. Thank you" — -Bartolomeo Vanzetti, to Judge Thayer, upon being sentenced to death, April 9, 1927
      On 05 May Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who had immigrated to the United States in 1908, one a shoemaker and the other a fish peddler, were arrested for the crime. On 31 May 1921, they were brought to trial before Judge Webster Thayer of the Massachusetts Superior Court, and on 14 July both were found guilty by verdict of the jury. Socialists and radicals protested the men's innocence.
      Many people felt that there had been less than a fair trial and that the defendants had been convicted for their radical, anarchist beliefs rather than for the crime for which they had been tried. All attempts for retrial on the ground of false identification failed. On 18 November 1925, one Celestino Madeiros, then under a sentence for murder, confessed that he had participated in the crime with the Joe Morelli gang. The state Supreme Court refused to upset the verdict, because at that time the trial judge had the final power to reopen on the ground of additional evidence. The two men are sentenced to death on 09 April 1927.
      A storm of protest arose with mass meetings throughout the nation. Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed an independent advisory committee consisting of President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University, President Samuel W. Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robert Grant, a former judge. On 03 August 1927, the governor refused to exercise his power of clemency; his advisory committee agreed with this stand.
      Demonstrations proceeded in many cities throughout the world, and bombs were set off in New York City and Philadelphia. Sacco and Vanzetti, still maintaining their innocence, were executed 23 August 1927.
      Opinion has remained divided on whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty as charged or whether they were innocent victims of a prejudiced legal system and a mishandled trial. Some writers have claimed that Sacco was guilty but that Vanzetti was innocent. There is widespread agreement, however, that the two men should have been granted a second trial in view of their trial's significant defects.
      In 1977 the governor of Massachusetts, Michael S. Dukakis, issued a proclamation stating that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been treated justly and that no stigma should be associated with their names.
1914 Austria-Hungary declares war against Russia
1914 Serbia declares war against Germany
1904 The Japanese army in Korea surrounds a Russian army retreating to Manchuria.
1902 Coronación de Eduardo VII como rey de Inglaterra.
1896 Una ley francesa declara la anexión de Madagascar.
1873 España hace extensivas a Puerto Rico las libertades consagradas en su Constitución de 1869.
1870 White conservatives suppressed black vote & captured Tenn legislature
1864 Rebels evacuate Ft Powell, Mobile Bay
1863 The CSS Alabama captures the USS Sea Bride near the Cape of Good Hope.
1863 Siege of Fort Wagner, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina continues
1862 CSS ironclad "Arkansas" is badly damaged in Union attack and is scuttled near Baton Rouge, Louisiana
1854 Congress passes Confiscation Act
1846 US Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker, 45, reinstates the Independent Treasury System. Walker also inaugurates a system for warehousing imports that endures to this day.
1840 El futuro emperador Napoleón III de Francia, desembarca en la playa de Vimereux, cerca de Boulogne, para derrocar al gobierno francés y hacerse con el poder, pero será detenido junto a sus cómplices.
1837 The Dow Industrial Average reaches the peak of a rise that started on May 31, during which it gained 37.93 points, inspiring false hopes that the nation would soon recover from the bank-induced panic of '37.
1827 Oregon Territory to remain divided
      Representatives of the United States and Great Britain decide to continue their joint occupation of Oregon territory, to which they first agreed in a border agreement of 1818. American and British fur-trading companies were in competition in the region, and Canada's Hudson Bay Company would continue to control the richer portions of it.
      However, US exploration was increasing, and in 1829 Hall J. Kelley of Boston would found the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory. By 1838, the issue of who possessed Oregon would become increasingly controversial, especially when mass American migration along the Oregon Trail began during the early 1840s.
      American expansionists urged seizure of Oregon, and in 1844, Democrat James K. Polk successfully ran for president under the platform, "Fifty-four Forty or Fight," which referred to his hope of bringing a sizable portion of present-day Vancouver and Alberta into the United States. However, neither President Polk nor the British government wanted a third Anglo-American war, and on June 15, 1846, the Oregon Treaty was signed. By the terms of the agreement, the US and Canadian border was extended west along the forty-ninth parallel to the Strait of Georgia, just short of the Pacific Ocean. The US gained formal control over the future states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, and the British retained Vancouver Island and navigation rights to part of the Columbia River.
1825 Bolivia gains independence from Peru (National Day)
1824 En la batalla de Junín, las tropas de Simón Bolívar vencen al ejército del Virrey del Perú, por lo que Perú y Bolivia se independizan de España.
1815 US flotilla ends piracy by Algiers, Tunis & Tripoli
1813 Simón Bolívar entra en Caracas tras la victoria de Taguanes. En esta fecha recibe el nombre de Libertador.
1811 Las Cortes de Cádiz decretan la abolición de todos los señoríos jurisdiccionales de España.
1801 The Great Religious Revival of the American West begins at a Presbyterian camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky. 1792 Desfilan por París 600 republicanos escogidos de Marsella cantando una canción nueva cuyos acentos, en pocas semanas, han de arrastrar al país entero: "La Marsellesa".
1787 First draft of new US Constitution debated      ^top^
      In Philadelphia, delegates to the Constitutional Convention begin debating the first complete draft of the proposed Constitution of the United States, largely made up of ideas first presented by James Madison in his Virginia Plan.
      In 1786, three years after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, defects in the post-Revolutionary Articles of Confederation became apparent, such as the lack of central authority over foreign and domestic commerce. Congress endorsed a plan to draft a new constitution, and on 25 May 1787, the Constitutional Convention began its proceedings at Independence Hall.
      On 17 September 1787, after three months of debate moderated by convention president George Washington, the new US constitution, which created a strong federal government with an intricate system of checks and balances, would be signed by thirty-eight of the forty-one delegates present at the conclusion of the convention. As dictated by Article VII, the document would not become binding until it was ratified by nine out of the thirteen states.
      Beginning on 07 December, five states — Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut — ratified it in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document as it failed to reserve powers not delegated by the Constitution to the states, unless specifically prohibited, and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and the right to bear arms.
      In February of 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document with the assurance that amendments would be immediately proposed. The Constitution was thus narrowly ratified in Massachusetts, followed by Maryland and South Carolina. On 21 June 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document and it was subsequently agreed that government under the US Constitution would begin on 04 March 1789.
      At the first session of the US Congress, held in New York City on the appointed day, only nine of twenty-two senators and thirteen of fifty-nine representatives showed up to begin negotiations for the Constitution's amendment. Six months later, the first Congress of the United States adopted twelve amendments to the US Constitution — the Bill of Rights — and sent them to the states for ratification. This action led to the eventual ratification of the Constitution by the last of the thirteen original colonies: North Carolina and Rhode Island.
1786 Burns released from marriage      ^top^
     Robert Burns, 27, is released from a questionable marriage to Jean Armour, whom he later married anyway. Burns and Armour evidently met in 1784. By early 1786, Armour was pregnant. She produced a marriage contract signed by Robert Burns. Although her father, enraged at Burns, had the contract mutilated and partially destroyed, Burns was still anxious to officially certify himself as single. To free himself from the marriage, whose validity was questionable, he appeared before the local government three times, did public penance in a church, and is finally acknowledged a single man on this day.
      However, he continued to see Armour and eventually married her. The couple had nine children, the last of whom was born on the day of Burns' funeral. Burns also had three children with other women.
      Just a few weeks before he was absolved of marriage obligations, Burns had published his first and most famous work, Poems and Songs, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. A poor, self-educated farmer, Burns became the darling of elite Edinburgh intellectual society, for both his peasant/poet background and his brilliant conversation. Perhaps more famous for his lively lyrics in the Scottish dialect than for his longer, more literary poems,
      Burns is still beloved and celebrated today. Burns fans around the world celebrate his birthday, January 25, with rowdy and ribald dinners of haggis and other Scottish delicacies, and his words resound every New Year's Eve, when For Auld Lang Syne is sung (an old song to which he added a part). He died on 21 July 1796.
BURNS ONLINE: Poems and Songs
AULD LANG SYNE (2.2 M wav)
Should auld acquaintance be forgot / and never brought to mind? / Should auld acquaintance be forgot / and days of auld lang syne?
(Chorus:) For auld lang syne, my dear, / for auld lang syne, / we'll take a cup o' kindness yet / for auld lang syne.
We twa hae run aboot the braes / And pou'd the gowans fine; / we've wander'd mony a weary foot / Sin' auld lang syne. (Chorus)
We twa hae paidl't i' the burn, / Frae mornin' sun till dine; / But seas between us braid hae roar'd / Sin' auld lang syne. (Chorus)
And here's my hand my trusty frien', / and gie's a hand o' thine; / we'll take a right gude-willi waught / for days of auld lang syne. (Chorus)
And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp, / And surely I'll be mine; / And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet / For auld lang syne. (Chorus)
Meaning of some words:
lang syne = long ago / braes = hillsides / pou'd = pulled / gowans = daisies / paidl't = waded / burn = stream / braid = broad / stowp = payer
1774 English religious leader Ann Lee (1736-1784) and a small band of followers first arrived in America. Her sect called itself the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming, but to the rest of the world her followers came to be known as the "Shakers."
1726 Russia becomes part of the Treaty of Vienna (signed 1725) and puts 30'000 soldiers at the disposal of her allies in return for support against a possible war with the Ottoman Empire.
1497 John Cabot returns to England after his first successful journey to the Labrador coast.
1181 Supernova observed by Chinese & Japanese astronomers.
TO THE TOP
Deaths which occurred on an August 06:
2002:: 35 pilgrims, including 10 children, in Zinapecuaro, Mexico, in bus, whose brakes failing, goes through a toll booth and crashes into a concrete wall. Some 20 are injured. The 26-year-old Costa Grande bus was taking members of the conservative Luz del Mundo church, from the state of Guerrero, to a a re-enactment of the Last Supper in Guadalajara.
2002 Ali Ajouri, 23, and Murat Marshut, 19, both of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, shot by Israeli troops in Jabaa, West Bank. Israel says that Ajouri sent two suicide bombers who killed three foreign workers and two Israelis in Tel Aviv on 17 July 2002. The Reuters body count of the al-Aqsa intifada stands at “at least” 1484 Palestinians and 585 Israelis.
2002 Nine Hindu pilgrims and one of the half-dozen Muslim attackers who, before dawn, throw a hand grenade and shoot in the pilgrimage transit camp in Nunwan, Indian-occupied Kashmir. Police return fire. 27 pilgrims are wounded.
2001 General Duong Van “big” Minh, 86, in Pasadena, California, from a fall suffered the previous day. He was South Vietnam's president when on 30 April 1975 it surrendered unconditionally to to the Vietcong's “Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam”. A military adviser (1962–63) to President Diem, he helped to overthrow Diem in 1963. He was head of government (1963–64), after which he went into exile. Minh returned in 1968, serving as an opposition leader against President Thieu. A presidential candidate in 1971, Minh withdrew, charging election rigging. After Nguyen Van Thieu fled the country on 21 April 1975, his successor transferred his powers to Big Minh on 28 April 1975, in an unsuccessful conciliation effort but Minh was placed in detention after the Communist takeover.
2000 Many sprats which rain down, freshly dead, on the fishing port of Great Yarmouth, in the east England county of Norfolk, after being sucked up by a waterspout.
1998 André Weil, 92, in Princeton      ^top^
     Weil was born on 6 May 1906 in Paris, of Jewish parents. He studied at universities in Paris, Rome and Göttingen, receiving his D.Sc. from the University of Paris in 1928. He then taught at various universities, for example the Aligarh Muslim University in India from 1930 to 1932, and the University of Strasbourg, France from 1933 until the outbreak of World War II.
André Weil     The war was a disaster for Weil who was a conscientious objector and so wished to avoid military service. He fled to Finland as soon as war was declared in an attempt to avoid becoming forced into the army, but it was not a simple matter to escape from the war in Europe at this time. He was sent from Finland back to France where he was put in prison. Weil was certainly in great danger at this time, partly because he was Jewish, partly because he had a sister, Simone Weil who was a mystic philosopher and a leading figure in the French Résistance. The dangers of his predicament made Weil decide that being in the army was a better bet and he was able to argue successfully for his release on the condition that indeed he did join the army.
      Having used the army as a reason to get out of prison, Weil had no intention of serving any longer than he possibly could. As soon as the chance to escape to the United States came, he took it at once. In the United States he went to Pennsylvania where he taught from 1941 at Haverford College and at Swarthmore College. In 1945 he accepted a position in Sao Paulo University, Brazil where he remained until 1947. In 1947 Weil returned to the United States and he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago, a position he continued to hold until 1958. In 1948-49, John Canu and his father, a visiting professor at Chicago that year, were often guests of Weil. From 1958 Weil worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He retired in 1976, becoming Professor Emeritus at that time.
      Weil's research was in number theory, algebraic geometry and group theory. His work can be summarized thus: Beginning in the 1940s, Weil started the rapid advance of algebraic geometry and number theory by laying the foundations for abstract algebraic geometry and the modern theory of abelian varieties. His work on algebraic curves has influenced a wide variety of areas, including some outside mathematics, such as elementary particle physics and string theory. In fact Weil's work in this area was basic to work by mathematicians such as Yau who was awarded a Fields Medal in 1982 for work in three-dimensional algebraic geometry which has major applications to quantum field theory.
      Yau is not the only mathematician who received a Fields Medal for work which continued that begun by Weil. In 1978 Deligne was awarded a Fields Medal for solving the Weil Conjectures. Here is a description of Weil's fundamental contribution: One of Weil's major achievements was his proof of the Riemann hypothesis for the congruence zeta functions of algebraic function fields. In 1949 he raised certain conjectures about the congruence zeta function of algebraic varieties over finite fields. These Weil conjectures, as they came to be called, grew out of his deep insight into the topology of algebraic varieties and provided guiding principles for subsequent developments in the field. Weil's work on bringing together number theory and algebraic geometry was highly fruitful. The foundations of many topics studied in depth today were laid by Weil in this work, such as the foundations of the theory of modular forms, automorphic functions and automorphic representations.
      However, Weil's work was of major importance in a number of other new mathematical topics. He contributed substantially to topology, differential geometry and complex analytic geometry. It was not just to these areas that he contributed but, even more importantly, his work brought out fundamental relationships between the areas when he studied harmonic analysis on topological groups and characteristic classes. Also bringing these areas together was his work on the geometric theory of the theta function and Kähler geometry.
      Together with Dieudonné and others, Weil wrote under the name Nicolas Bourbaki, a project they began in the 1930s, in which they attempted to give a unified description of mathematics. The purpose was to reverse a trend which they disliked, namely that of a lack of rigour in mathematics. The influence of Bourbaki has been great over many years but it is now less important since it has basically succeeded in its aim of promoting rigour and abstraction.
      Weil's most famous books include Foundations of Algebraic Geometry (1946) and Elliptic Functions According to Eisenstein and Kronecker (1976).
      Weil received many honors for his outstanding mathematics. Among these has been honorary membership of the London Mathematical Society in 1959 and election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of London in 1966. In addition he has been elected to the Academy of Sciences in Paris and to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
      Weil was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1950 at Harvard and again at the following International Congress in 1954. In 1979 Weil was awarded the Wolf Prize and, in the following year, the American Mathematical Society awarded him their Steele Prize. In 1994 he received the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation of Japan ... for outstanding achievement and creativity. The citation for the Kyoto Prize reads: The results achieved and problems raised by André Weil through his deep understanding of and sharp insight into mathematical sciences in general will continue to have immeasurable influence on the development of mathematical sciences, and to contribute greatly to the development of science, as well as the deepening and uplifting of the human spirit.
Quotations by André Weil
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced ... the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously... this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work...
The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician.

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.
Quoted in H Eves Mathematical Circles Adieu (Boston 1977).

Rigor is to the mathematician what morality is to men.

First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.


André Weil: A Prologue   /   André Weil (1906 — 1998)    /   André Weil and Algebraic Topology    /    André Weil as I Knew Him   [this “I” is not me] /    The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician — -Autobiography of André Weil    //   Fermat's Last Theorem
1987 José María Lacarra de Miguel, historiador español.
1986 William J. Schroeder, after living 620 days with the Jarvik 7 artificial heart.
1980 Marino Marini, Italian painter and sculptor, born on 27 February 1901 in Pistoia. He studied at the Academy of Art in Florence. In Paris 1928-29, and from 1929-40 taught at the School of Art at the Villa Reale in Monza. In 1940 he became Professor of Sculpture at the Brera in Milan. Lived and worked in Milan and Forte dei Marmi. — LINKSHorses and rider (color lithograph)
1978 Paul VI, 80, Pope since 1963, of heart attack, at summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.
1973 Fulgencio Batista, ex presidente y dictador de Cuba.
Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima1945, 80'000 men, women, and children, in Hiroshima nuclear horror.      ^top^
     At 08:16. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world's first nuclear bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Some 80'000 people, almost a third of the population, are killed as by the blast and the resulting fire storm, and another 35'000 are injured. At least another 60'000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.
      US President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference's demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade the Japanese mainland.      And so on August 5, while a "conventional" bombing of Japan was underway, one of the two nuclear bombs available was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets' plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets' B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 02:45. on 06 August. Five and a half hours later, the bomb is dropped, exploding 580 m over a hospital and unleashing the equivalent of 12'500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read "Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis" (the ship that transported the bomb to the Marianas).
      There were 90'000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped; only 28'000 remained after the bombing. Of the city's 200 doctors before the explosion; only 20 were left alive or capable of working. There were 1780 nurses before — only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and dying. According to John Hersey's classic work Hiroshima, the Hiroshima city government had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work clearing fire lanes in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. They were out in the open when the Enola Gay dropped its load. There were so many spontaneous fires set as a result of the bomb that a crewman of the Enola Gay stopped trying to count them. Another crewman remarked, “It's pretty terrific! What a relief! It worked!”
     In all some 200'000 innocent men, women, and children, would eventually die, if not from the burns, then a slow, agonizing, unprecedented death from radiation sickness, as a result of that bomb and of the one dropped on Nagasaki three days later.
     Three days later, the major coastal city of Nagasaki would be hit, prompting Japan's unconditional surrender and bringing the most costly war in human history to an end. Both cities would be rebuilt, but the horror of the world's only nuclear attacks would remain. By the end of 1945, a total of some 200'000 people had perished as a result of the bombings. Many of those who survived faced a future of disease, premature death, and birth defects in children yet to be born.
     Thereafter this day would be commiserated (rather than commemorated) as 1945 “Hiroshima Peace Day”.
     The United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Though the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan marked the end of World War II, many historians argue that it also ignited the Cold War. Since 1940, the United States had been working on developing an atomic weapon, after having been warned by Albert Einstein that Nazi Germany was already conducting research into nuclear weapons. By the time the United States conducted the first successful test (an atomic bomb was exploded in the desert in New Mexico in July 1945), Germany had already been defeated. The war against Japan in the Pacific, however, continued to rage. President Harry S. Truman, warned by some of his advisers that any attempt to invade Japan would result in horrific American casualties, ordered that the new weapon be used to bring the war to a speedy end. On 06 August 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A blast equivalent to the power of 15'000 tons of TNT reduced four square miles of the city to ruins and immediately killed 80'000 people. Tens of thousands more died in the following weeks from wounds and radiation poisoning. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing nearly 40'000 more people. A few days later, Japan announced its surrender. In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective. First, of course, was to bring the war with Japan to a speedy end and spare American lives. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between US President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the US atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War. If US officials truly believed that they could use their atomic monopoly for diplomatic advantage, they had little time to put their plan into action. By 1949, the Soviets had developed their own atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race began.
Ce jour du 6 août 1945 restera le plus horrible du siècle. Aucune autre tragédie n’a pu l’effacer des mémoires. Que s’est-il donc passé dans la tête des dirigeants américains ? Accélérer la fin de la guerre en précipitant la reddition du Japon ou tester l’arme nucléaire qui était toute nouvelle ? Les deux sans doute. La guerre, en vérité, était pratiquement terminée ce 6 août 1945 : les Alliés étaient entrés dans l’Allemagne vaincue en mai, la conférence de Yalta, qui devait partager le monde entre l’URSS et les Alliés, avait eu lieu en février, les Soviétiques avaient pris la capitale allemande, Hitler s’était suicidé en avril et le même mois Mussolini avait été exécuté par des partisans le 28 avril. Il ne restait de la guerre que l’entêtement japonais, tout relatif. Entre février et mai 1945, le Japon avait perdu des batailles décisives, perdu plus de 100 000 hommes et 4 000 avions, perdu des territoires comme Iwo Jima et Okinawa face aux Américains, et Tokyo avait été bombardée le 10 mars. Le Japon était affaibli même s’il refusait de capituler comme l’avaient fait ses alliés allemands et italiens. Cette bombe était alors de trop. L’idée que les USA voulaient faire un test en live n’est toujours pas exclue. Le 16 juillet, soit vingt jours avant Hiroshima, ils avaient testé une bombe atomique dans le désert de Los Alamos, dans le Nouveau Mexique. Ce 6 août et le 9 août, ils l’essayaient sur des êtres humains : à Hiroshima et à Nagasaki, la bombe avait fait 120 000 morts et 2 villes détruites. Le mikado comprit alors la puissance de cette arme de destruction qui menaçait de détruire tout le Japon et annonça le 14 août sa capitulation qui sera signée le 2 septembre dans la rade de Tokyo, en présence de MacArthur.
1945 Koebe, mathematician
1925 Ricci-Curbastro, mathematician
1890 William Kemmler, murderer, executed by electrocution, a first      ^top^
      At Auburn Prison in New York, the first execution by the electric chair in history is carried out on William Kemmler, convicted of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe. Electrocution as a more humane means of execution was first suggested in 1881 by Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist. Southwick had witnessed an elderly drunkard "painlessly" killed after touching the terminals of an electrical generator in Buffalo, New York.
      In 1889, New York's Electrical Execution Law, the first of its kind in the world, went into effect, and Edwin R. Davis, the Auburn Prison electrician, was commissioned to design an electric chair. Closely resembling the modern device, Davis's chair was fitted with two electrodes, which were composed of metal disks sandwiched between a rubber holder and covered with a damp sponge. The electrodes were to be applied to the criminal's head and back.
      On 06 August 1890, William Kemmler, convicted of first-degree murder, becomes the first person to be sent to the chair. After he is strapped in, a charge of approximately 700 volts is delivered for only seventeen seconds before the current fails. Witnesses smell burnt clothing and charred flesh, but Kemmler is far from dead, and a second shock is prepared, of 1030 volts this time and applied for about two minutes, whereupon smoke is observed coming from the head of Kemmler, who is clearly dead.
      An autopsy showed that the brain below the headpiece had hardened and the flesh under the electrode on the back had burned through to the spine. Dr. Alfred P. Southwick applauded Kemmler's execution with the declaration, "We live in a higher civilization from this day on," while American inventor George Westinghouse, an innovator of the use of electricity, remarked, "They would have done better with an axe."
1969 Theodor W. Adorno, sociólogo alemán.
1923 Luigi Rossi, Swiss artist born on 10 March 1853.
1875 Gabriel García Moreno, político ecuatoriano.
1874 Jim Reed, outlaw, killed by a member of his gang for reward money. Reed's widow “Belle” (née Myra Maybelle Shirley) would marry two years later Reed's bandit mentor, Cherokee Tom Starr, and become know as the “Bandit Queen”. Both Belle and Starr would separately die shot within a few years.
1867 Faustin-Élie Soulouque emperor of Haiti, dies (birth date unknown)
1862 C.S.S. Arkansas, 25 days old, blown up by her crew.      ^top^
      The C.S.S. Arkansas, the most feared Confederate ironclad on the Mississippi River, is blown up by her crew after suffering mechanical problems during a battle with the USS. Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Arkansas's career lasted just 23 days. In August 1861, the Confederate Congress appropriated $160'000 to construct two ironclad ships for use on the Mississippi. Similar in style to the more famous C.S.S. Virginia (Merrimack), both the ships were 50 meters long and 11 meters wide, and were constructed in Memphis. Since a labor shortage delayed completion, they were not finished when the Union captured Memphis in May 1862. One ironclad was burned to prevent capture, and the Arkansas was towed south to the Yazoo River. Lieutenant Isaac Brown, the ship's commander, showed great innovation and determination in completing construction of the craft. A sunken barge loaded with railroad rails was raised so that the rails could be bolted to the hull of the Arkansas, and local planters opened their forges to the builders.
      On 12 July, the work was completed and Brown steered the ship down the Yazoo and into the Mississippi. The Arkansas came out of the Yazoo with guns blazing. She ran off three Union ships, inflicting heavy damage on two of them, and ran a gauntlet of 16 Union ships, damaging several as she slipped down the river toward Vicksburg. The Union commander, Admiral David Farragut, was furious that a single ship could cause so much damage to his flotilla, so he sent his ships in pursuit of the Confederate menace. At dusk, Farragut marked the position of the Arkansas as it lay anchored at Vicksburg. In the dark, he sent his ships one by one past this position, and each ship fired a volley into the spot where the Arkansas should have been. But Brown had fooled the Yankees by moving his ship after dark.
      The Arkansas sparred with two other Union ships on 22 July, successfully running off the ships but suffering damage to her engines. The ship was ordered south to Baton Rouge on August 3 to support Confederate operations there, but the Arkansas suffered more engine problems and ran aground. While the crew worked on repairs, the USS. Essex steamed up for a confrontation. The Arkansas set sail, but a propeller shaft broke and left the vessel circling helplessly. She ran aground again, and the crew blew up the ship before the Essex could move in for the kill. Although the Arkansas was never defeated, unreliable engines doomed the craft to an early death.
1806 Holy Roman Empire, 552 years old under that name, it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. The last Holy Roman Emperor, rather than see the title taken by his worst enemy and future son-in-law Napoléon Bonaparte (who considered himself "the new Charlemagne"), Francis II resigns and remains content to be what he is in reality, the hereditary emperor of Austria (1804-35); king of Hungary (1792-1830), and king of Bohemia (1792-1836).
1702 Claude Huillot, French artist born in 1632.
1694 Antoine Arnauld, 82, mathematician.
1660 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Spain's greatest Baroque era painter, baptized as an infant on 06 June 1599.
MORE ON VELAZQUEZ AT ART “4” AUGUST LINKS Self~Portrait Self-portrait (1640) — Self Portrait (1643) Christ in the House of Martha and Mary Las Meninas _ detail 1 _ detail 2 La Rendición de Breda (“Las Lanzas”) _ detail 1 _ detail 2 _ detail 3 Doña Mariana of Austria, Queen of HungaryMort de St. JosephEl Dios MarteReunión De Bebedores.— Retrato de un AncianoEl Niño De VallecasEsopo. Retrato de un Viejo DescamisadoLa FamiliaRetrato de UN Enano de FelipeThe Infanta Doña Margarita de AustriaPortrait of the Infanta MargaritaInfante Philip Prosper _ detail (dog) — Christ on the CrossThe Immaculate ConceptionPhilip IV in Army Dress _ Philip IV in Army Dress (The portrait of Fraga) — Philip IV in Brown and SilverPhilip IVEquestrian Portrait of Philip IV King Philip IV as a HuntsmanCardinale Infante Ferdinand of Austria as HunterPrince Baltasar Carlos as HunterPrince Baltasar Carlos on HorsebackBreakfastPeasants at the Table (El Almuerzo)The Adoration by the MagiChrist in the House of Mary and MarthaAbbess Jerónima de la FuenteThe Supper at EmmausPhilip IVDoña Maria de Austria, Queen of HungaryThe Drinkers (The Rule of Bacchus)Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to JacobThe Forge of VulcanSibylChrist on the CrossThe Count-Duke of Olivares on HorsebackJuan Martínez MontáñezBuffoon BarbarrojaThe Dwarf Don Juan CalabazasThe Dwarf Francisco Lezcano, Called "El Niño de Vallecas"Court Dwarf Don Antonio El InglésThe Dwarf Sebastian de MorraDiego de Acedo (El Primo)AesopMenippusThe Coronation of the VirginPortrait of a ManPope Innocent X — a different Portrait of Innocent XJuan de ParejaLas HilanderasVenus at her Mirror (The Rokeby Venus)View of ZaragozaThe Pavilion Ariadné in the Médici Gardens in Rome “Sunshine” — The Entrance to the Grotta in the Médici Gardens in Rome “Noon”
— The Breakfast (1620, version 1 _ version 2), — BacchusJoseph and His BrothersSaints Anthony and PaulOld Woman Frying EggsThree Men at TableThe Waterseller in SevilleMother Jerónima de la FuenteThe Adoration by the MagiThe Forge of VulcanJoseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to JacobVenus at her MirrorThe Fable of Arachne. — Velázquez commemorative postal stamps.
1002 El amir cordobés Almanzor ibn Abí, durante la Batalla de Calatañazor, enfrentamiento entre una coalición navarro-castellana y las tropas amiridas.
0768 (or 769?) Constantine II, anti-Pope. Even before Paul I's death (28 June 767) trouble began about the election of his successor. Duke Toto of Nepi with a body of Tuscans burst into Rome, and, despite the opposition of the primicerius (chief of the notaries) Christopher, forcibly intruded his brother Constantine, a layman, into the chair of Peter (5 July 767). In the spring of 768, however, Christopher and his son Sergius contrived to escape from the city, and with the aid of the troops sent to Rome by Lombard king Desiderius, killed Toto and blinded and deposed the usurper, who had . failed to win support from the Carolingian king Pépin III le Bref or from the Franks. Constantine's deposition was canonically ratified by a council of Italian and Frankish bishops.
0523 Saint Hormisdas, 52nd Pope
0258 Saint Sixtus II, 24th Pope
— 133 a. C Los defensores de Numancia, tras siete años de resistencia, queman la ciudad y se arrojan a las llamas antes que rendirse a los romanos.
Births which occurred on an August 06:
1959 Chevrolet Corvair      ^top^
      The Chevrolet Corporation registers the Corvair name for its new rear-engine compact car. Corvairs would become quite controversial — people either loved them or hated them. The car was accused of being “unsafe at any speed,” with much criticism directed toward its handling, even though a 1972 government study later exonerated the Corvair. Today, the Corvair is considered rare and collectable and has been called one of the most significant cars in automotive history.
1951 Ignacio Bosque Muñoz, filólogo español.
1944 Darío Morales, pintor, grabador y escultor colombiano.
1934 Landelino Lavilla, abogado español, ex presidente del Congreso de los Diputados y de UCD.
1932 The Drive-In Movie Theater      ^top^
      Richard Hollingshead, Jr., first registers his patent for the drive-in movie theater. Tired of ordinary movie houses, Hollingshead wanted to create a theater where parents could bring the children in their pajamas, avoid baby-sitters, and relax in the comfort of their own car while watching a Friday night film. Hollingshead would be awarded the patent in May of the following year, though it was declared invalid in 1950. After that, thousands of drive-ins appeared on the American landscape, reaching a high of 4063 in 1958.
1932 Howard Hodgkin, British Abstract painter.
MORE ON HODGKIN AT ART “4” AUGUST LINKSNick's Room [no more detail than in a postage stamp] — After CorotSmall Henry Moore at the Bottom of the GardenRain in the PalazzoA Storm
1928 Chung Se Yung, in Kangwon Province, Korea.      ^top^
      He would grow up to be, in 1967, a cofounder of the Hyundai Motor Company, one of the largest auto manufacturers in the world, actively exporting to 160 countries. Its international network consists of 145 independent importers and distributors, as well as several subsidiaries, such as Hyundai Motor America.
1928 Andrew Warhola “Andy Warhol”      ^top^
(filmmaker, pop artist: Campbell Soup; "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."). He died on 22 February 1987.
     US artist and filmmaker, an initiator and leading exponent of the Pop art movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. An adroit self-publicist, he projected a concept of the artist as an impersonal, even vacuous, figure who is nevertheless a successful celebrity, businessman, and social climber.
MORE ON WARHOL AT ART “4” AUGUST
LINKSPolaroid Self-PortraitThe Souper Dress (1960) — Liz (1964) — Campbell's Tomato Soup (1968) — The Velvet Underground and Nico [a banana] (1967) — Kimiko Powers (1972) — Birmingham Race Riot (1964) — Flowers (1964) — Lenin (1986) — MarilynMarilyn Monroe [x 50] (1962) — Mao (1973) — Goethe [x 4] — Gun (1981) — SpamLast SupperDollar Signs
1921 Carmen Laforet, novelista española.
1916 Richard Hofstadter, physicist who won the Nobel prize in 1961 for his studies of neutrons and protons.
1914 Julio Cortázar, escritor francés nacido en Bélgica, impulsor de la literatura iberoamericana.
1911 Lucille Désirée Ball (Emmy Award-winning comedienne, actress: I Love Lucy [1952, 1953], The Lucy Show [1966-67, 1967-68], 12th Annual Atlas Governor's Award [1988-89]; The Lucille Ball Comedy Hour, Yours, Mine and Ours, Mame). Lucille Ball died on 26 April 1989.
1906 Gerardo Molina Ramírez, ideólogo y político colombiano.
1894 Joseph Lacasse, French artist who died on 226 October 1975.
1893 Jacques Martin-Ferrières, French artist who died in 1972.
1883 Scott Nearing US sociologist/pacifist/author (The Good Life)
1881 Sir Alexander Fleming (Scottish Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist [1954]: discovered penicillin in 1928).
1872 George Hand Wright, US artist who died in 1951.
1868 Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel France, diplomat, poet (Cinq grandes odes 1910), playwright (La Ville 1890, L'Echange 1893, Le Repos du septième jour 1896, Partage de midi 1906, L'Otage 1911, L'Annonce faite à Marie 1912, Le Pain dur 1918, Le Père humilié 1916<, Le Soulier de satin 1924), author of oratorios (Le Livre de Christophe Colomb 1933, Jeanne d'Arc 1938) essayist, a towering force in French literature of the first half of the 20th century, whose works derive their lyrical inspiration, their unity and scope, and their prophetic tone from his faith in God. Claudel died on 23 February 1955. — Paul Claudel, escritor católico francés.
1866 Plinio Nomellini, Italian artist who died in 1943.
1862 Armand André Louis Rassenfosse, Belgian artist who died in 1934.
1827 José Manuel Marroquín Ricaurte, político, escritor y filólogo colombiano.
1811 Judah P. Benjamin, first Jewish US Senator, pro-slavery (LA-1852-1861). Confederate Attorney General, then Secretary of War, then Secretary of State. Then prominent lawyer in England. Wrote Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property (1868)
1809 Alfred Lord Tennyson (English poet laureate: The Charge of the Light Brigade, In Memoriam)      ^top^
      Tennyson was born into a chaotic and disrupted home. His father, the eldest son of a wealthy landowner, was disinherited in favor of his younger brother. Forced to enter the Church to support himself, the Rev. Dr. George Tennyson became a bitter alcoholic. However, he educated his sons in the classics, and Alfred Tennyson, the fourth of 12 children, went to Trinity College at Cambridge in 1827. The same year, he and his brother Charles published Poems by Two Brothers. At Cambridge, Tennyson befriended a circle of intellectual undergraduates who strongly encouraged his poetry. Chief among them was Arthur Hallam, who became Tennyson's closest friend and who later proposed to Tennyson's sister.
      In 1830, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The following year, his father died, and he was forced to leave Cambridge for financial reasons. Besieged by critical attacks and struggling with poverty, Tennyson remained dedicated to his work and published several more volumes.
      The sudden death of Tennyson's dear friend Arthur Hallam in 1833 inspired several important works throughout Tennyson's later life, including the masterful In Memoriam of 1842.   On 14 May 1842 Tennyson published a volume called Poems. While the 32-year-old poet had already published several other books of verse, Poems, which included works like "Ulysses" and "Morte D'Arthur," was considered his best work to date. The book confirmed his growing stature as a poet after more than a decade of writing.
      The publication of Poems in 1842 boosted Tennyson's reputation, and in 1850 Queen Victoria named him poet laureate. At long last, Tennyson achieved financial stability and finally married his fiancee Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved since 1836.
      Tennyson's massive frame and booming voice, together with his taste for solitude, made him an imposing character. He craved solitude and bought an isolated home where he could write in peace. In 1859, he published the first four books of his epic Idylls of the King. Eight more volumes would follow. He continued writing and publishing poems until his death on 6 October 1892.
TENNYSON ONLINE:
  • Enoch Arden, &c.  (1864) /   Enoch Arden, &c. (another site)
  • Idylls of the King (1859), a series of 12 connected poems broadly surveying the legend of King Arthur from his falling in love with Guinevere to the ultimate ruin of his kingdom. The poems concentrate on the introduction of evil to Camelot because of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, and on the consequent fading of the hope that had at first infused the Round Table fellowship.
  • The Lady of Shalott (1833)
  • The Princess: A Medley (1847) /   The Princess: A Medley (another site) a singular anti-feminist fantasia in one long poem.
  • 1741 John Wilson, mathematician
    1697 Charles VII Holy Roman emperor (1742-45)
    1651 François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon.      ^top^
         He would become a French archbishop, theologian, and man of letters whose liberal views on politics and education and whose involvement in a controversy over the nature of mystical prayer caused concerted opposition from church and state. His pedagogical concepts and literary works, nevertheless, exerted a lasting influence on French culture..
         Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet had criticized Mme Guyon, a leading Quietist. Fénelon responded with Explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure (1697), which not only lost him Bossuet's friendship but also exposed himself to Bossuet's public denunciation. As a result, Fénelon's Maximes des saints was condemned by the pope.
         Fénelon died on 7 January 1715
    FÉNELON ONLINE: FENELON ONLINE:
  • De l'Education des Filles  (1687) /  De l'Education des Filles (autre site) /  De l'Education des Filles (RTF)
  • Dialogues des morts: composés pour l'Education d'un Prince
  • Dialogues sur l'Eloquence en général et sur celle de la Chaire en particulier
  • Les Aventures de Télémaque; suivies des Aventures d'Aristonoüs  (1699) /    Les Aventures de Télémaque (autre site)
  • Traité de l'Existence et des Attributs de Dieu
    In English translation:
  • The Maxims of the Saints
  • Spiritual Progress: or, Instructions in the Divine Life of the Soul, (co-author Jeanne Marie Guyon)
  • 1638 Nicolas Malebranche.      ^top^
         He would grow up to be a French Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and major Cartesian, therefore philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. He became a Cartesian after reading Descartes's Traité de l'homme.
         Malebranche's principal work is De la recherche de la vérité, 3 vol. (1674-75). Criticism of its theology by others led him to amplify his views in Traité de la nature et de la grâce (1680). His Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion (1688), a series of 14 dialogues, has been called the best introduction to his system. His other writings include research into the nature of light and color and studies in infinitesimal calculus and in the psychology of vision. His scientific works won him election to the Académie des Sciences in 1699. Also influential are his Méditations chrétiennes (1683) and Traité de morale (1683).
         Malebranche died on 17 October 1715.
    MALEBRANCHE ONLINE:
  • Méditations sur l'humilité et la pénitence
  • Méditations sur l'humilité et la pénitence (autre site)
  • 1594 Chevaert Douffet, Flemish artist who died in 1660.
    Holidays Australia : Bank Holiday / Bolivia : Independence Day (1825) / Hiroshima, Japan : Peace Festival at Peace Memorial Park (1945) / Iceland : Bank Holiday / Jamaica : Independence Day (1962) / Malawi, Ireland : August Holiday / UAE : Accession of H.H. Sheik Zayed Ben Sultan Al-Nahayan / Arizona, Michigan : American Family Day - ( Sunday ) / Italy : Joust of the Quintana (1st Sunday) - ( Sunday )

    Religious Observance RC, Ang : Transfiguration of the Lord / La Transfiguración del Señor. Santos Agapito, Genaro, Vicente, Justo y Pastor.

    Thoughts for the day: “The average woman would rather be beautiful than smart because the average man can see better than he can think.” [Now you know why there are so many divorces]
    “The whole earth is a garden, a natural garden, except where the hand of man has set foot.”
    [It is restored to a garden, an artificial garden, where the hand of woman has knelt]
    “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your country can do to you.”
    “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask not what your country can do to you, ask what your country can do without you.”
    “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask not what your country can do to you, ask not what your country can do without you, ask what your country can do to mine!”
    “Ask what your country can do to mine gold.”
    “When you tell someone to go to hell, you are leading the way.”
    ASK NOT
         A sixth-grade teacher was giving a lesson in US History and asked her class, “Who can tell me which US president said the following phrase and in what year: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”?
         Everyone in the class looked stumped, except for a little Japanese boy holding his hand up in the front row. “Yes, Yoshiro?” said the teacher. “That was John F. Kennedy, and I think the year was 1962,” answered Yoshiro. “Very good, Yoshiro. Now the rest of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You're all US–born citizens except the only one who knew the answer and he is from Japan,” chided the teacher.
          Then, from the back of the class, a voice grumbled, “To hell with the Japanese!”
          ”Who said that?” inquired the teacher sternly.
           Another boy raised his hand and said, “It must have been Harry S. Truman in 1945.”
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