august 20

August 20 is the 232nd day of the year (233rd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 133 days remaining.

Events

900-1899

917 - Battle of Anchialus: Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria invades Thrace and drives the Byzantines out.
1794 - Battle of Fallen Timbers - American troops force a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa and Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat.
1804 - Lewis and Clark Expedition: The "Corps of Discovery", whose purpose is to explore the Louisiana Purchase, suffers it first and last death when Sergeant Charles Floyd dies, apparently from acute appendicitis.
1833 - Nat Turner leads his revolt against the Southern plantation owners of Southampton County, Virginia
1882 - Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture debuts in Moscow.

1900-1999

1914 - World War I: German forces occupy Brussels.
1920 - The first commercial radio station, 8MK (WWJ), begins operations in Detroit, Michigan.
1940 - Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded in Mexico City by an assassin's ice-ax. He will die the next day.
1955 - In Morocco, a force of Berbers from the Atlas Mountains region of Algeria, raid two rural settlements and kill 77 French nationals.
1960 - Senegal breaks from the Mali federation, declaring independence.
1968 - 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to end the "Prague Spring" of political liberalization.
1975 - Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.
1977 - Voyager program: The United States launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft.
1982 - Lebanese Civil War: A multinational force lands in Beirut to oversee the PLO withdrawal from Lebanon.
1986 - In Edmond, Oklahoma, US Postal employee Patrick Henry Sherrill guns down 14 of his co-workers and then commits suicide.
1988 - Peru becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty.
1989- In Beverly Hills, California, Lyle and Erik Menendez shoot their wealthy parents to death in their family's den.
1991 - Collapse of the Soviet Union:
1991 - Estonia declares its independence from the Soviet Union.
1991 - More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union's parliament building protesting the coup that deposed President Mikhail Gorbachev.
1993 - After rounds of secret negotiations in Norway, the Oslo Peace Accords were signed, followed by a public ceremony in Washington D.C. the next month.
1997 - Souhane massacre in Algeria; over 60 people killed, 15 kidnapped.
1998 - The Supreme Court of Canada states Quebec can not legally secede from Canada without the federal government's approval.
1998 - 1998 U.S. embassy bombings: The United States military launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum is destroyed in the attack.