On Aug.20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are then bought by English colonists.

In 1882, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” had its premiere in Moscow.

In 1945, 11 days after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, Brooklyn Dodgers utility player Tommy Brown homers to drive in his team’s only run in an 11-1 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In 1953, the Soviet Union acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, a nearly $1 billion anti-poverty meassure.

In 1968, during the night, approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”—a brief period of liberalization in the communist country.

In 1975, Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Mars.

In 1988, a cease-fire in the war between Iraq and Iran went into effect.

In 2017, actor, comic and longtime telethon host Jerry Lewis died of heart disease in Las Vegas at the age of 91.

In 2019, President Donald Trump abruptly canceled an upcoming trip to Denmark, which owns Greenland, after the Danish prime minister dismissed the idea of the United States purchasing the mostly frozen island.