On This Day:
Wednesday August 20, 2014 This is the 232nd day of the year, with 133 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: dinosaurs Abundant fossil remains of dinosaurs exist from every continent, though this constitutes less than 0.0001 percent of all the individual dinosaurs that once lived.
Holidays Feast day of St. Rognwald or Ronald, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Amator or Amadour, St. Philibert, and St. Oswin.
Hungary: St. Stephen's Day.
Morocco: Revolution of the King and the People.
Events 1667 - John Milton published "Paradise Lost," an epic poem about the fall of Adam and Eve.
1741 - Danish navigator Vitus Jonas Bering, commissioned by Peter the Great of Russia to find land connecting Asia and North America, discovered Alaska. His name still graces the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait.
1866 - President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, even though the fighting had stopped months earlier.
1866 - The newly organized National Labor Union called on the U.S. Congress to mandate an eight-hour workday.
1940 - Radar was used for the first time, by the British during the Battle of Britain.
1960 - Senegal gained independence from France.
1968 - The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations began invading Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek's regime.
1975 - Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Mars.
1977 - The U.S. Voyager I spacecraft was launched on its journey via Jupiter and Saturn to become the first artificial object to leave the solar system.
1979 - Swimmer Diana Nyad succeeded in her third attempt at swimming from the Bahamas to Florida.
1991 - Estonia declared independence.
Births 1833 - Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President of the United States of America (1889-1893).
Deaths 1940 - Leon Trotsky, Russian communist politician and rival of Joseph Stalin, assassinated.
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