History for August 24

History for August 24 - On-This-Day.com
Yasser Arafat 1929, Mason Williams 1938, Anne Archer 1947 - Actress


Steve Guttenberg 1958 - Actor, Cal Ripken, Jr. 1960 - Baseball player, Marlee Matlin 1965 - Actress


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.


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


1932 - Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the U.S. non-stop. The trip from Los Angeles, CA to Newark, NJ, took about 19 hours.


1949 - The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) went into effect. The agreement was that an attack against on one of the parties would be considered "an attack against them all."


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.


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.