August 23

Ptolemy III laid the foundation, and the temple was finished 180 years later, in 57 BCE. It is the best-preserved temple in Egypt, partly because drifting sand and later houses filled it almost to the roof until it was cleared in the 1860s.

Horsemen of the Khwarazmian empire the Mongols had destroyed, hired by the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, stormed the unwalled city in July and took the citadel in August. Jerusalem was never again in Christian hands in the Middle Ages.

Congress had sent the king the Olive Branch Petition, asking him to mediate with Parliament. He refused to receive it and declared the colonies in open rebellion instead.

An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature. — Eunice Foote Foote set glass cylinders of different gases in the sun. The one filled with carbonic acid gas, CO₂, heated most and cooled slowest. Joseph Henry read her paper to the American Association for the Advancement of…

Farragut’s fleet forced the entrance to the bay; the army besieged the forts until Fort Morgan fell on 23 August. Blockade runners lost the last major Confederate port on the Gulf east of Texas. 1,822 casualties (NPS).

A professional time the amateur record books never counted, and the target every amateur miler measured himself against until 1915.

George had turned professional to race William Cummings, the paid champion, for a purse. His 4:12¾ was the fastest mile anyone had run, and no amateur beat it for almost twenty-nine years. He trained with an exercise he called the “100-up”: running on the spot, knees to the hips, a hundred times.

“The unexpected always happens”: Renfield escapes twice in a night. The second time he is found again against the old chapel door of Carfax, and grows suddenly calm as the attendants hold him. Seward looks round and sees only “a big bat, which was flapping its silent and ghostly way to the west”.

Eight years and six weeks, four days longer than Taber’s.

The Finn raced with a stopwatch in his hand and ran to the schedule on it. Here he beat the Swede Edvin Wide in 4:10.4, a year before winning five gold medals at the Paris Olympics.

Eight years, through a war that stopped most European athletics.

Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and signed a non-aggression pact with Molotov, with Stalin looking on. A secret protocol divided Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Bessarabia into German and Soviet spheres. Hitler invaded Poland nine days later.

Germany’s last great offensive in the east struck both sides of a bulge around Kursk. The Soviets knew it was coming and had dug belts of defences many kilometres deep. After it failed, the Red Army held the initiative for the rest of the war.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which had handed the three states to Stalin, about two million people joined hands in a chain 675.5 kilometres long from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius.

Chris Messina asked on Twitter: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” The company thought it too nerdy. Users adopted it anyway, and Twitter began to link hashtags in 2009.

India became the fourth country to land softly on the Moon, and the first near its south pole. Four days earlier Russia’s Luna 25, its first Moon mission since 1976, had crashed in the same region.