Today in History: August 11

3114 B.C.: The Mayan calendar starts.

480 B.C.: Spartans under Leonidas, facing a force 25 times their size, are wiped out at the Battle of Thermopylae, but not before giving the Persians such losses that their invasion of Greece will ultimately fail.

1492: Rodrigo Borgia, who took his legal training at Bologna, becomes Pope as Alexander VI.

1919: Germany adopts the Weimar Constitution.

1919: Andrew Carnegie, who rose from bobbin boy in a cotton mill to become the founder of the modern American steel industry, dies at Leonx, Massachusetts.

1950: Stephen Wozniak is born at San Jose, California.  In 1975, he and Steve Jobs will launch the personal computer revolution with $1,300 and a garage workroom.

1956: Jackson Pollock ceases abruptly to be the “greatest living American artist” when he gets drunk and crashes his car, killing himself and a passenger.

1965: Rioting breaks out in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts.  It will, among other things, destroy $100 million in property, mostly that of local businesses.

1987: Alan Greenspan becomes Chair of the Federal Reserve Board.

1991: Nickelodeon unveils its first cartoon series: Doug, Rugrats, and Ren and Stimpy.