Today's Highlight in History:
On Aug. 23, 1927, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery. (Fifty years later, on this date in 1977, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis proclaimed that "any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed" from their names.)
On this date:
In 1754, France's King Louis XVI was born at Versailles.
In 1775, Britain's King George III proclaimed the American colonies in a state of "open and avowed rebellion."
In 1858, "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," a play about the tragic consequences of consuming alcohol, opened in New York.
In 1914, Japan declared war against Germany in World War I.
In 1926, silent film star Rudolph Valentino died in New York at age 31.
In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in Moscow.
In 1944, Romanian prime minister Ion Antonescu was dismissed by King Michael, paving the way for Romania to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies.
In 1960, Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein II died in Doylestown, Pa., at age 65.
In 1973, a bank robbery-turned-hostage standoff began in Stockholm, Sweden; by the time the crisis ended, the four hostages had come to empathize with their captors, an occurrence now referred to as "Stockholm Syndrome."
In 1982, Lebanon's parliament elected Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel president. (However, Gemayel was assassinated some three weeks later.)
Ten years ago: Boris Yeltsin again dismissed the Russian government, replacing his 36-year-old prime minister, Sergei Kiriyenko, with the Soviet-style leader he'd fired five months earlier, Viktor Chernomyrdin.
