Today in History - onthisday.com

 

                                                                                                    August 13th

1514 French King Louis XII (52) marries by proxy Mary Tudor (18), sister of Henry VIII, at Greenwich Palace, England

1521 Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés capture Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc in Tenochtitlan, bringing the Aztec Empire to an end

1536 Buddhist monks from Kyoto's Enryaku-ji Temple set fire to 21 Nichiren temples throughout Kyoto in the Tenbun Hokke Disturbance (Traditional Japanese date: July 27, 1536)

1642 Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovers Mars's southern polar cap

1788 Prussia joins the Anglo-Dutch alliance to form the Triple Alliance to prevent the spread of the Russo-Swedish War of 1788-90

1913 Otto Witte, German acrobat and fantasist, is purportedly crowned King of Albania

1937 Second Sino-Japanese War: Japanese forces start the Battle of Shanghai, a three-month conflict involving over one million troops

1942 The Manhattan Project commences under the direction of US General Leslie Groves with the aim of developing an atomic bomb

1961 Construction of the Berlin Wall begins in East Germany 

1967 "Bonnie and Clyde" crime film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway is released

2013 "Crash My Party," the fourth studio album by Luke Bryan, is released (Billboard Album of the Year 2014)

2008 American super-swimmer Michael Phelps wins three gold medals, all in world record time, in one day at the Beijing Olympics: 200 m IM (1:54.23), 200 m butterfly (1:52.03), and 4x200m freestyle relay (6:58.56)