August 17, 1786 - Davy Crockett
Often referred to as the "King of the Wild Frontier", Crockett was a celebrated 19th century frontiersman, solider and politician. He represented Tennessee in the House of Representatives, and greeting a crowd on his way to Congress, he bragged, "I'm that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust tree." So was Crockett exaggerating his rough and tumble reputation? Quite probably, but then consider this...a recent episode of the Discovery Channel Mythbusters series took on his claim that he could stick an axe partially into a tree trunk, and then fire his musket from 40 yards away and hit the protruding edge of the axe so precisely that the bullet would split in two. The verdict? They declared the myth "Confirmed", as they were able to duplicate the feat from 20 yards.

August 17, 1893 - Mae West
West was an actress, playwright and sex symbol of the early 1900s, making a name for herself in Vaudeville and on the New York stage before moving to Hollywood and the movie scene. She was one of the more controversial stars of her day, and often confronted with censorship of her work. One rather tame example of her often-edgy quotations..."When I'm good, I'm very good. When I'm bad, I'm better."

August 19, 1902 - Ogden Nash
An American writer, best remembered for his humorous poetry. A few examples are in order...

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.

and...

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.

August 19, 1871 - Orville Wright
Orville and his brother Wilbur are generally credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. Although they were not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft, they were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing flight possible. Their breakthrough was the "three-axis control", which enable pilots to steer an aircraft and maintain equilibrium, and which forms the basis of aircraft controls to this day.

August 20, 1833 - Benjamin Harrison
23rd president of the U.S. (Republican). from 1889 to 1893.  A number of milestones were reached during Harrison's one-term presidency. Six additional states were admitted into the Union (North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming), and annual federal spending reached one billion dollars for the first time ever. In Harrison's bid for re-election, the Democrats attacked the "Billion Dollar Congress", and used the issue to defeat the Republicans. How times have changed...some 70 years later Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen was credited with this remark - "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money".
 

August 21, 1959 - Hawaii Admission Day - 50th Anniversary
On this day in 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation making Hawaii the 50th state in the Union. Hawaii is the only state made up entirely of islands, and has a current population of roughly 1.3 million residents. How many of you didn't realize that Hawaii wasn't a state back on December 7th, 1941 when the Japanese bombed America's Pacific fleet stationed in Hawaii's Pearl Harbor? At that time, Hawaii was a "territory" of the United States.  

August 21, 1858 - Lincoln / Douglas Debates
A series of seven debates that took place between August 21st and October 15, 1858, these verbal contests were covered extensively by the local and national press, and were instrumental in Lincoln's eventual nomination for President of the United States in 1860. The format of the debates was vastly different than those of recent years. One candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute "rejoinder".

August 24, 2006 - Pluto Demoted
Pluto was initially discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, an astronomer from Kansas working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The discovery made front page news around the world, and a contest to name the new planet was soon underway. "Pluto" was proposed by an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, and in a vote cast by Lowell astronomers, it bested two other finalists - "Minerva", and "Cronus". Alas, in 2006 Pluto's classification as a planet was unceremoniously removed and Pluto was demoted to "dwarf planet" status. In January 2007, the American Dialect Society chose "plutoed" as its 2006 Word of the Year, defining "to pluto" as "to demote or devalue someone or something". Used in a sentence, it might come in handy when telling your spouse that you've just been given a demotion at work - "Honey, I've been plutoed".

August 26, 1883 - Krakatoa Eruption
With all of the focus on the extreme weather of recent years - hurricanes, climate change and so on - consider this...in the past 126 years there has been no explosion - man-made or natural, that has come close to the magnitude of the volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883. The eruption was equivalent to a 200 megaton explosion - about 13,000 times that of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima during World War II. The explosion destroyed 165 villages and towns, heavily damaged another 132, resulted in at least 36,417 fatalities, and was heard as far as 3,000 miles away,

Lincoln and Douglas:  The Debates that Defined America,  by Allen Guelzo
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln was known as a successful Illinois lawyer who had achieved some prominence in state politics as a leader in the new Republican Party. Two years later, he was elected president and was on his way to becoming the greatest chief executive in American history.

What carried this one-term congressman from obscurity to fame was the campaign he mounted for the United States Senate against the country's most formidable politician, Stephen A. Douglas, in the summer and fall of 1858. Lincoln challenged Douglas directly in one of his greatest speeches -- "A house divided against itself cannot stand" -- and confronted Douglas on the questions of slavery and the inviolability of the Union in seven fierce debates. As this brilliant narrative by the prize-winning Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo dramatizes, Lincoln would emerge a predominant national figure, the leader of his party, the man who would bear the burden of the national confrontation.

Of course, the great issue between Lincoln and Douglas was slavery. Douglas was the champion of "popular sovereignty," of letting states and territories decide for themselves whether to legalize slavery. Lincoln drew a moral line, arguing that slavery was a violation both of natural law and of the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. No majority could ever make slavery right, he argued.

Lincoln lost that Senate race to Douglas, though he came close to toppling the "Little Giant," whom almost everyone thought was unbeatable. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas brings alive their debates and this whole year of campaigns and underscores their centrality in the greatest conflict in American history.

The encounters between Lincoln and Douglas engage a key question in American political life: What is democracy's purpose? Is it to satisfy the desires of the majority? Or is it to achieve a just and moral public order? These were the real questions in 1858 that led to the Civil War. They remain questions for Americans today.