On Aug. 23, 1754, Louis XVI, the last king of France in the line of Bourbon monarchs before the French Revolution of 1789, was born at Versailles.
In 1852 economist and social reformer Arnold Toynbee was born in London.
In 1926 silent-film star Rudolph Valentino died in New York; he was 31.
In 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact.
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 1972 the Republican National Convention, meeting in Miami Beach, nominated Vice President Spiro Agnew to a second term.
In 1979 Soviet dancer Alexander Godunov defected while the Bolshoi Ballet was on tour in New York.
In 1982 Lebanon’s parliament elected Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel president. (He was assassinated about three weeks later.)
In 1989 Yusuf Hawkins, an African-American teenager, was shot dead after he and his friends were confronted by white youths in a Brooklyn neighborhood.
In 1999, 50 years after the German government moved its capital to Bonn, Berlin reclaimed its role as a center of power in Germany with the arrival of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
In 2000 an estimated 51 million viewers tuned in for the final episode of the CBS reality series “Survivor,” in which Richard Hatch won the top prize of $1 million.
In 2002 New York publicist Lizzie Grubman pleaded guilty in a hit-and-run crash that injured 16 people outside a Hamptons nightclub.
In 2003 former 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. Also in 2003 All-Star baseball player Bobby Bonds, father of San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, died in San Carlos, Calif.; he was 57.
