Today in History: August 19

1186: Geoffrey Plantagenet is stamped to death by his horse during a tournament at Paris, leaving the way open for his younger brother John to succeed Richard I as king of England.

1782: Ten months after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, the British win the last battle of the American Revolution at Blue Licks in what is now Kentucky.

1839: The French government, which has acquired the patent for Louis Daguerre’s new invention of photography, announces that the new process will be made “free to the world.”

1848: The New York Herald announces that gold has been discovered in California, triggering the California Gold Rush.

1870: Financier Bernard Mannes Baruch is born at Camden, South Carolina, the son of a German-born surgeon on the staff of Gen. Robert E. Lee.  He’ll make a fortune and head his own brokerage house by age 33.

1895: Gunfighter-turned-lawyer John Wesley Hardin, who spent 17 years in prison for murdering 40 men before being pardoned, is shot to death during a dice game at the Acme Saloon in El Paso, Texas.

1929: Chicago radio station WMAQ’s Amos & Andy debuts on the NBC Radio Network, sponsored by Pepsodent toothpaste.  It will become the longest-running radio show, going off the air in 1960.

1942: Fred Dalton Thompson (Vanderbilt Law 1967) is born at Sheffield, Alabama.  He’ll become the first sitting U.S. Senator to become a regular star in a popular television program, Law & Order.

1946: William Jefferson Clinton who will probably affect the public perception of lawyers more than anyone since Richard Nixon, is born at Hope, Arkansas.