What Happened in August?

Richard M Nixon announces in a national television address delivered from the Oval Office on the evening of August 8, 1974, that he he will resign the presidency the following day, August 9, 1974, due to the Watergate scandal. Expand +

The Equal Educational Opportunities Act (EEOC) is signed by President Richard Nixon and becomes a US federal law. The EEOC Act of 1974 prohibits discrimination against faculty, staff, and students, including racial segregation of students, and requires school districts to take action to overcome barriers to students' equal participation. Expand +

A 707 passenger flight chartered by the national airline of Morocco, Royal Air Maroc, flying in heavy fog crashed into a mountain on approach to Agadir Inezgane, Airport in Morocco. All 188 passengers and crew on board were killed. The cause of the crash was determined to be pilot error. More

The term "Global Warming" is used for the first time in a science publication. The article by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" More

Viking 1 launches on its way to Mars.  it became the first U.S. mission to land a spacecraft safely on the surface of Mars and return images of the surface. More

The Solidarity movement in Poland, led by Lech Walesa, signs the Gdansk Agreement with the communist government, marking a significant milestone in the fight for workers' rights. Solidarity opposed Communist rule and was outlawed the following year.  Expand +

The Solidarity movement in Poland is officially recognized by the government after a wave of strikes and protests, marking a significant step in the fight for workers' rights and democracy, leading to its participation in negotiations that eventually ended Communist rule in Poland in 1989. More

President Reagan signs the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA), the 185-page that fulfilled his campaign promise to cut taxes. The act helped accelerate economic growth but it is blamed for being a major contributor to the growth of Income inequality in the U.S. which is now at heights not seen for a century. More

Filipino opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" S. Aquino, Jr., was assassinated at the Manila airport while leaving his plane. Public outcry ultimately led to the collapse of the government of Ferdinand E. Marcos and the inauguration as president of Corazon C. Aquino, widow of the slain man.

Delta Air Lines Flight 191, Lockheed L-1011 TriStar airplane, crashes at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport during a landing approach. The cause of the accident was determined to be an intense, localized downburst (microburst), a weather phenomenon not well understood at the time. Of the 163 persons aboard, 134 passengers and crewmembers were killed at the scene in addition to one person hit on the ground. Two passengers died more than 30 days after the accident as a result of their injuries. More

Japan Air Lines Flight 123 flight from Tokyo to Osaka, Japan crashes in the area of Mount Takamagahara, 62 miles from Tokyo. The Boeing 747 suffered a severe structural failure and decompression 12 minutes into the flight and crashed 32 minutes later after flying under minimal control for that time. 520 people died in the accident. All four survivors were seriously injured. The root cause of the explosive decompression was attributed to an improperly executed repair to the airplane's aft pressure bulkhead that was completed several years prior to the accident. The crash of Flight 123 is the deadliest single-aircraft accident in aviation history. More

A volcanic eruption under Lake Nyos in Cameroon caused deadly fumes which killed more than 1,500 persons. More

A DC-9 Super 82 on Northwest Flight 255 crashes minutes aftertakeoff at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Michigan. The flight was headed to California with a Phoenix stopover. A four-year-old girl was the sole survivor of the accident,156 people died. The crash was caused by pilot error. More

A McDonnell Douglas MD-82, operating as Northwest Airlines Flight 255, crashed shortly after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, about 8:46 pm EDT.  resulting in the deaths of 156 people; 148 of the 149 passengers, along with two people on the ground and all six crew members. The sole survivor was a 4-year-old girl named Cecelia Cichan, who sustained serious injuries.  Expand +

The Ray Brothers’ family home in Arcadia, Florida burns down. It was almost certainly a case of arson fueled by fear and ignorance. The three boys- Ricky, Robert and Randy- were born with hemophilia and were 10, 9 and 8 at the time. They had been diagnosed positive with HIV in 1986 and were not allowed to attend school following their positive test results. Expand +

Iraq invades Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and five days later, on August 7, 1990 U.S. President George H.W. Bush orders Operation Desert Shield, the US operational name for the US buildup of forces and Saudi Arabia's defense which lasted until January, 16 1991 in preparation to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.  Expand +

The largest-ever Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton is discovered on a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. The 65-million-year-old specimen is dubbed Sue, after its discoverer fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson. South Dakota. More

English computer scientist Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee also known as TimBL, makes public the files describing his concept and ideas for the World Wide Web (WWW) including the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) system and announces WWW as a publicly available service on the internet. He created a page titled "World Wide Web", featuring links to additional pages with information on himself, his team of scientists and the history of the project. It is these links which represented the web's real breakthrough. The website’s landing page described the World Wide Web (WWW) as "a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative with the aim of giving universal access to a large universe of documents." Today, we know it as just the web. More

Soviet hardline Communists staged a coup, temporarily removing Mikhail Gorbachev from power. The coup failed within 72 hours as democratic reformer Boris Yeltsin rallied the Russian people. Yeltsin then became the leading power in the country. The Communist Party was soon banned and by December the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. More

Latvia declares its independence from the Soviet Union. It had been occupied and annexed by the U.S.S.R. in 1940. Latvia is a country in northeastern Europe, situated on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. It's one of the three Baltic States, along with Estonia and Lithuania. Latvia has a population of around 1.8 million people. The capital and largest city is Riga. The official language is Latvian. More