Today is Thursday, Aug. 20, the 232nd day of 2009. There are 133 days left in the year.

On this date:

In 1833, Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president of the United States, was born in North Bend, Ohio.

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, months after fighting had stopped.

In 1914, German forces occupied Brussels, Belgium, during World War I.

In 1920, pioneering American radio station 8MK in Detroit (later WWJ) began daily broadcasting.

In 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force, saying, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

In 1955, hundreds of people were killed in anti-French rioting in Morocco and Algeria.

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

In 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations began invading Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" liberalization drive led by Alexander Dubcek.

In 1977, the US launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature.

In 1979, Diana Nyad succeeded in her third attempt at swimming from the Bahamas to Florida.

In 1989, entertainment executive Jose Menendez and his wife, Kitty, were shot to death in their Beverly Hills, California, mansion by their sons, Lyle and Erik. Fifty-one people died when a pleasure boat sank in the River Thames in London after colliding with a dredger. British conservationist George Adamson, 83, was shot and killed by bandits in Kenya.

Thought for Today:

"History abhors determinism, but cannot tolerate chance." — Bernard De Voto, American author, journalist and critic (1897-1955).