History for August 4

History for August 4 - On-This-Day.com
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 - Poet, Louis Armstrong 1901 - Musician, singer, Raoul Wallenberg 1912 - Sweedish humanitarian during World War II


John Riggins 1949 - Football player, Barack Hussein Obama 1961 - 44th President of the United States, Jeff Gordon 1971 - Race car driver, Jeff Gordon


1735 - Freedom of the press was established with an acquittal of John Peter Zenger. The writer of the New York Weekly Journal had been charged with seditious libel by the royal governor of New York. The jury said that "the truth is not libelous."


1790 - The Revenue Cutter Service was formed. This U.S. naval task force was the beginning of the U.S. Coast Guard.


1821 - "The Saturday Evening Post" was published for the first time as a weekly.


1944 - Nazi police raided a house in Amsterdam and arrested eight people. Anne Frank, a teenager at the time, was one of the people arrested. Her diary would be published after her death.


1972 - Arthur Bremer was found guilty of shooting George Wallace, the governor of Alabama. Bremer was sentenced to 63 years in prison.


1983 - New York Yankee outfielder Dave Winfield threw a baseball during warm-ups and accidentally killed a seagull. After the game, Toronto police arrested him for "causing unnecessary suffering to an animal."


1987 - The Fairness Doctrine was rescinded by the Federal Communications Commission. The doctrine had required that radio and TV stations present controversial issues in a balanced fashion.


1991 - The Oceanos, a Greek luxury liner, sank off of South Africa's southeast coast. All of the 402 passengers and 179 crewmembers survived.