August 4

1463 – Patron of many great renaissance artists, Lorenzo de’ Medici is born in Florence, Italy

1693 – Benedictine monk Dom Perignon invents champagne

1704 – Gibraltar is captured from the Spanish by an English and Dutch fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir George Rooke.

1790 – The Revenue Cutter Service, the predecessor to the Coast Guard is created

1834 – English mathematician John Venn, inventor of the Venn Diagram, using circles to denote sets, is born in Yorkshire, England.

1873 – The 7th Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Custer, has its first minor engagement with the Cheyenne and Lakota near the Tongue River in Montana, while protecting a railroad survey party

1889 – The Great Fire of Spokane, Washington destroys 32 blocks of the city, prompting a mass rebuilding project.

1892 – The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden are found murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home

1914 – The Germans invade neutral Belgium. In response Belgium and the British Empire declare war on Germany. The United States declares its neutrality.

1944 – A Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to a sealed off area in an Amsterdam warehouse, where they find and arrest Anne Frank and her family

1964 – U.S. destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy report coming under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.

1977 – President Carter signs legislation creating the United States Department of Energy.

1987 – The Federal Communications Commission rescinds the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ which required radio and television stations to present controversial issues “fairly”. (AKA ‘Equal Time’)

2007 – NASA’s Phoenix Mars probe spacecraft is launched.

2019 – Antifa supporter, 24 year old Connor Betts, kills 9 people and wounds another 26 before being engaged, 32 seconds after his first shot, and killed by Police in Dayton, Ohio.

2020 – At least 220 people are killed and over 5,000 are wounded when 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate explodes in Beirut, Lebanon.