#Middlebury
On Aug. 9, 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s classic “Walden; or, A Life in the Woods” is published. The book is Thoreau’s account of his experimental time of simple living in a cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, starting in 1845. The book sold just 300 copies a year when it was published.- On Aug. 13, 1878, Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner, dies of yellow fever in Memphis, Tennessee, after a man who had escaped a quarantined steamboat visited her restaurant. The disease spread rapidly, and the resulting epidemic emptied the city. An average of 200 people died each day through September.
- On Aug. 15, 1914, the Panama Canal, the American-built waterway across the Isthmus of Panama, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, is inaugurated. U.S. engineers moved nearly 240 million cubic yards of earth and spent more than $10 billion in today’s dollars in constructing the 40-mile-long canal.
- On Aug. 11, 1921, author Alex Haley is born in Ithaca, New York. His novel “Roots” (1976) was a fictionalized account of his family’s history, traced through seven generations. It won a special Pulitzer Prize.
- On Aug. 14, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signs into law the Social Security Act, which guaranteed an income for the unemployed and retirees. The Social Security system has remained relatively unchanged since 1935.
- On Aug. 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 the maximum-security Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, England. Wilson remained on the loose until 1968.
- On Aug. 10, 1981, Pete Rose of the Philadelphia Phillies gets the 3,631st hit of his baseball career, breaking Stan Musial’s record, in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. Musial had spent his entire career with the Cardinals, and he was on hand to congratulate Rose.
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