August 24
Things that happened on this day that you never had to memorize in school
79: Vesuvius erupts.
1456: Printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed in Mainz.
1814: British troops burn the Capitol and the White House after U.S. troops, fleeing so fast that only eight of them were killed, left Washington DC virtually undefended.
1889: Birth of fantasist Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires.
1912: Cathlamet tribe awarded $7,000, Clatsop $16,000 and Chinook $20,000 for claims from loss of aboriginal lands at mouth of Columbia River.
1930: Indochina: Two killed in riots on third anniversary of Sacco and Vanzetti execution.
1932: Amelia Earhart becomes first woman to fly non-stop across the U.S..
1934: IWW pickets attacked by capitalist farmers, Yakima, Washington.
1943: Danes from Odensa riot against government compliance with the Nazis.
1943: Simone Weil dies, Ashford, Kent, England. Seven people attend her funeral. Mystic and anarchist sympathizer.
1949: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established by the U.S., Canada, and ten Western European nations. It established that an armed attack against one or more of them would be considered an attack against all.
1954: Congress passes Communist Control Act, signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
1958: Six thousand in the sparsely populated Central American colony of British Honduras (now Belize) march for self-government.
1960: Coldest temperature ever recorded in the world was reached at Vostok Station, Antarctica, at -126.9 degrees fahrenheit.
1967: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin throw 300 one-dollar bills from balcony onto floor of New York Stock Exchange, creating instant bedlam.
1970: UFW lettuce strike begins.
1971: State Attorney Edward Hanrihan of Illinois indicted in Chicago for attempting to block the prosecution of a policeman who raided a Black Panther apartment, killing two activists.
1981: South Africa invades Angola.
1986: Eruption of a volcano in northwestern Cameroon kills over 1,700 people.
1987: Bayard Rustin, prominent civil rights and anti-military activist in 1950s and 1960s, dies.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17393#24