On Aug. 23, 1754, Louis XVI, whose execution was one of the key events of the French Revolution, was born at Versailles (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
In 1869 poet and novelist Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kan.
In 1926 film star Rudolph Valentino, 31, died in New York.
In 1927 Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, convicted in 1921 of murdering two men in a 1920 robbery, were electrocuted in Boston.
In 1944 Romanian Prime Minister Ion Antonescu was dismissed by King Michael, paving the way for Romania to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies.
In 1946 Keith Moon, founding drummer of the rock band The Who, was born in London.
In 1960 Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein II died in Doylestown, Pa.; he was 65 (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
In 1979 Soviet dancer Alexander Godunov defected while the Bolshoi Ballet was on tour in New York.
In 1989 Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager, was shot dead after he and his friends were confronted by white youths in a Brooklyn neighborhood.
In 2000 an estimated 51 million viewers tuned in for the final episode of CBS’ reality series, “Survivor,” in which Richard Hatch won the top prize of $1 million.
In 2003 ex-priest John Geoghan, the convicted child molester whose prosecution sparked the sex-abuse scandal that shook the Roman Catholic Church nationwide, died after another inmate attacked him in a Massachusetts prison.
