Today is Thursday, Aug. 22, the 235th day of 2024.
There are 131 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On Aug. 22, 1851, the schooner America outraced more than a dozen British vessels off the English coast to win a trophy that came to be known as the America’s Cup.
Also on this date:
In 1922, Irish revolutionary Michael Collins was shot to death, apparently by Irish Republican Army members opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty that Collins had co-signed.
In 1965, a fourteen-minute brawl ensued between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers after Giants pitcher Juan Marichal stuck Dodgers catcher John Roseboro in the head with a baseball bat. (Marichal and Roseboro would later reconcile and become lifelong friends.)
In 1968, Pope Paul VI arrived in Bogota, Colombia, for the start of the first papal visit to South America.
In 1972, John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturile took seven employees hostage at a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn, New York, during a botched robbery; the siege, which ended with Wojtowicz’s arrest and Naturile’s killing by the FBI, inspired the 1975 movie “Dog Day Afternoon.”
In 1989, Black Panthers co-founder Huey P. Newton was shot to death in Oakland, California.
In 1992, on the second day of the Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho, an FBI sharpshooter killed Vicki Weaver, the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed welfare legislation that ended guaranteed cash payments to the poor and demanded work from recipients.
In 2003, Alabama’s chief justice, Roy Moore, was suspended for his refusal to obey a federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of his courthouse.
