In colonial New England, King Philip’s War effectively comes to an end when Philip, chief of the Wampanoag tribe, is assassinated by a Native American in the service of the English. In the early 1670s, 50 years of peace between the Plymouth colony and the local Wampanoag Indians began to deteriorate when the rapidly expanding […]

The brief and one-sided Spanish-American War comes to an end when Spain formally agrees to a peace protocol on U.S. terms: the cession of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Manila in the Philippines to the United States pending a final peace treaty. The Spanish-American War had its origins in the rebellion against Spanish rule that began in […]

On August 12, 1964, Charlie Wilson, part of the gang who pulled off the 1963 Great Train Robbery, one of the biggest heists of its kind, escapes from Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, England. Several men broke into the maximum-security facility to free Wilson, who remained on the loose until 1968. The so-called Great Train […]

On August 12, 1964, the British author and journalist Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy, dies of a heart attack at age 56 in Kent, England. Fleming’s series of novels about the debonair Agent 007, based in part on their dashing author’s real-life experiences, spawned one of the most […]

At 6:50 p.m. local time, a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747SR crashes into Mount Otsuka, 70 miles northwest of Tokyo. There were 524 people aboard, and all but four were dead by the time rescuers reached the remote crash site 12 hours later. JAL flight 123 took off from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport under the command […]

On August 12, 2014, smoky-voiced actress Lauren Bacall dies at her New York City home at age 89. Having shot to fame in her debut film To Have and Have Not (1944), in which she appeared opposite Humphrey Bogart, with whom she would have a legendary romance, Bacall forged a lasting career that spanned nearly […]