On This Day: August 14 (original) (raw)
Updated August 14, 2014, 5:33 am
On Aug. 14, 1945, President Truman announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.
On Aug. 14, 1886, Arthur J. Dempster, the American physicist who built the first device for measuring charged particles, was born. Following his death on March 11, 1950, his obituary appeared in The Times.
Go to obituary » | Other birthdays »
| 1848 | The Oregon Territory was established. |
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| 1900 | International forces entered Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion, which was aimed at purging China of foreigners. |
| 1917 | China declared war on Germany and Austria during World War I. |
| 1941 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of principles that renounced aggression. |
| 1945 | President Harry S. Truman announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II. |
| 1947 | Pakistan became independent of British rule. |
| 1969 | British troops arrived in Northern Ireland to intervene in sectarian violence between Protestants and Roman Catholics. |
| 1973 | U.S. bombing of Cambodia came to a halt. |
| 1980 | Workers went on strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland - a job action that resulted in the creation of the Solidarity labor movement. |
| 1980 | President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale were nominated for a second term at the Democratic National Convention in New York. |
| 1996 | The Republican National Convention in San Diego nominated Bob Dole for president and Jack Kemp for vice president. |
| 1997 | An unrepentant Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombing. |
| 2003 | A blackout hit the northeastern United States and part of Canada; 50 million people lost power. |
| 2006 | Israel halted its offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas as a U.N.-imposed cease-fire went into effect after a month of warfare that killed more than 900 people. |
| 2009 | Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a Charles Manson follower who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, was released from a Texas prison hospital after more than three decades behind bars. |
Historic Birthdays
Arthur J. Dempster 8/14/1886 - 3/11/1950 American physicist, inventor of the first mass spectrometer.Go to obituary »
| 70 | Paolo Sarpi 8/14/1552 - 1/14/1623 Venetian patriot and scholar |
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| 81 | Cosimo III 8/14/1642 - 10/31/1723 Italian - 6th duke of Tuscany |
| 36 | Letitia Landon 8/14/1802 - 10/15/1838 English poet and novelist |
| 86 | Ernest Thompson Seton 8/14/1860 - 10/23/1946 British/Canadian naturalist and writer; helped found the Boy Scouts of America |
| 77 | Ernest Thayer 8/14/1863 - 8/21/1940 American writer; wrote "Casey at the Bat" |
| 65 | John Galsworthy 8/14/1867 - 1/31/1933 English Nobel Prize-winning novelist and playwright (1932) |
| 86 | Daniel Jackling 8/14/1869 - 3/13/1956 American mining engineer and metallurgist |
| 79 | Eduardo Mallea 8/14/1903 - 11/12/1982 Argentine novelist, essayist and short-story writer |
| 85 | Pierre Schaeffer 8/14/1910 - 8/19/1995 French composer, acoustician and electronics engineer |
| 77 | Max Klein 8/14/1915 - 5/20/1993 American painter; invented "paint by numbers" |