History for August 24

History for August 24 - On-This-Day.com
Joshua Lionel Cowen 1880, Yasser Arafat 1929, Kenny Baker 1934 - Actor (R2D2 in "Star Wars")


Anne Archer 1947 - Actress, Steve Guttenberg 1958 - Actor, Cal Ripken, Jr. 1960 - Baseball player


0079 - Mount Vesuvius erupted killing approximately 20,000 people. The cities of Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum were buried in volcanic ash.


0410 - The Visigoths overran Rome. This event symbolized the fall of the Western Roman Empire.


1456 - The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.


1814 - Washington, DC, was invaded by British forces that set fire to the White House and Capitol.


1954 - The Communist Party was virtually outlawed in the U.S. when the Communist Control Act went into effect.


1995 - Microsoft's "Windows 95" went on sale.


2001 - The remains of nine American servicemen killed in the Korean War were returned to the U.S. The bodies were found about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It was estimated that it would be a year before the identies of the soldiers would be known.


2006 - The planet Pluto was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Pluto's status was changed due to the IAU's new rules for an object qualifying as a planet. Pluto met two of the three rules because it orbits the sun and is large enough to assume a nearly round shape. However, since Pluto has an oblong orbit and overlaps the orbit of Neptune it disqualified Pluto as a planet.