Again, like Sunday the 6th this day’s events are overshadowed by war. Nagasaki, Japan was devastated by the dropping of an atomic bomb – this time it was the one called Fat Man. There were 35,000 initial deaths, of whom only 150 were Japanese soldiers and up to 2,000 were Korean forced workers. The same day the Russian Red Army invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
In more peaceful news in 1897, the first International Congress of Mathematicians meeting was held in Zurich, Switzerland, which continues every 4 years to this day. In 1936 Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. And the US Forest Service and the Wartime Advertising Council released posters with Smokey the Bear for the first time in 1944.
Birthdays include Italian physicist and chemist Amedeo Avogadro (1776), Swiss philosopher and child psychologist Jean Piaget (1896), Australian tennis star Rod Laver (1938), and actors Gillian Anderson (1968 X-Files) and Sam Elliot (1944, Mask, Gettysburg, to name a few).
Departures on this date include Netherlands painter Hieronymus Bosch (1516), German-Swiss poet, painter, and novelist Hermann Hesse (1962),, Dead Head Jerry Garcia (1995), and dancer Gregory Hines (2003).
It is International Day of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples (UN) and National Peacekeepers Day in Canada
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