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Adv20 For release Wednesday, August 20

 
Published Aug. 19, 2014

1882, Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" had its premiere in Moscow.

1940, during World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force before the House of Commons, saying, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

1953, the Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.

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

1977, the U.S. 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.

1989: The sitcom "Saved by the Bell" premiered on NBC-TV.

2009: The only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 returned home to Libya after his release on compassionate grounds from a Scottish prison. (Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, said to have only months to live because of prostate cancer, died nearly three years later.)