On August 9, 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden, or, A Life in the Woods is published. It is required reading in many classrooms today, but when it was first published, it sold just around 300 copies a year. The American transcendentalist writer’s work is a first-person account of his experimental time of simple living […]

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, African American track star Jesse Owens wins his fourth gold medal of the Games in the 4×100-meter relay. His relay team set a new world record of 39.8 seconds, which held for 20 years. In their strong showing in track-and-field events at the XIth Olympiad, Jesse Owens and other African […]

Early in the morning of August 9, 1969, members of Charles Manson’s cult kill five people in movie director Roman Polanski’s Beverly Hills, California, home, including Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. Less than two days later, the group killed again, murdering supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home. The savage […]

On August 9, 1995, legendary Grateful Dead guitarist and cultural icon Jerry Garcia dies of a heart attack in a residential drug-treatment facility in Forest Knolls, California. Like his band, which was still going strong three decades after its formation, Garcia defied his life-expectancy not merely by surviving, but by thriving creatively and commercially into […]

On August 9, 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shoots and kills Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Protests and riots ensue in Ferguson and soon spread across the country. There are many different accounts of the incident, including the testimonies of Wilson and of Brown’s friend, Dorian […]