On Aug. 11, 1921, writer Alex Haley, who chronicled the African-American experience with works such as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Roots,” was born in Ithaca, N.Y.
In 1933 Jerry Falwell, the Baptist preacher who founded the Moral Majority, was born in Lynchburg, Va.
In 1934 the first federal prisoners arrived at the island prison Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
In 1942, during World War II, Vichy government official Pierre Laval publicly declared that ”the hour of liberation for France is the hour when Germany wins the war.”
In 1954 a formal peace took hold in Indochina, ending more than seven years of fighting between the between the French and the communist Vietminh.
In 1962 the Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev on a 94-hour flight.
In 1965 rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly African-American Watts section of Los Angeles; ultimately, 34 people were killed in the violence.
In 1992 the Mall of America, the biggest U.S. shopping mall, opened in Bloomington, Minn.
In 2003 Herb Brooks, who coached the U.S. Olympic Olympic hockey team to the “Miracle on Ice” victory over the USSR in 1980, died in a car crash near Minneapolis; he was 66.
In 2004 Britain granted its first license for human cloning for the purpose of stem cell research.
