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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On Aug. 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon and his family left the White House as his resignation took effect. Vice President Gerald R. Ford became the nation's 38th chief executive.
• On this date:
• In 1842, the United States and Canada resolved a border dispute by signing the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.
• In 1854, Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," which described Thoreau's experiences while living near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, was first published.
• In 1862, during the Civil War, Confederate forces drove back Union troops in the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Culpeper County, Va.
• In 1902, Edward VII was crowned king of Britain following the death of his mother, Queen Victoria.
• In 1936, Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at the Berlin Olympics as the United States took first place in the 400-meter relay.
• In 1942, Britain arrested Indian nationalist Mohandas K. Gandhi; he was released in 1944.
• In 1944, 258 African-American sailors based at Port Chicago, Calif., refused to load a munitions ship following an explosion on another ship that killed 320 men, many of them black. (Fifty of the sailors were convicted of mutiny, fined and imprisoned.)
• In 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, the United States exploded a nuclear device over Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people.
• In 1962, German-born Swiss poet and author Hermann Hesse, 85, died in Montagnola, Switzerland.
• In 1969, actress Sharon Tate and four other people were found brutally slain at Tate's Los Angeles home; cult leader Charles Manson and a group of his followers were later convicted of the crime.
• In 1982, a federal judge in Washington ordered John W. Hinckley Jr., who'd been acquitted of shooting President Ronald Reagan and three others by reason of insanity, committed to a mental hospital.
• In 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was brutalized in a Brooklyn, N.Y., stationhouse by officer Justin Volpe, who raped him with a broken broomstick. (Volpe was later sentenced to 30 years in prison.)
• Ten years ago: Oscar-winning actor and National Rifle Association president

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