August 20

August 20 is the 232nd day of the year, 133 days remaining

1882 - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture debuts in Moscow
1920 - The first commercial radio station, 8MK (WWJ), begins operations in Detroit, Michigan
1926 - Japan's public broadcasting company, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) is established
1953 - The Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb
1991 - Collapse of the Soviet Union: More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union's parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev. Estonia secedes from the Soviet Union.
1998 - The Supreme Court of Canada states Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the federal government's approval.

Birthday

1561 - Jacopo Peri, Italian composer
first opera to have survived to the present day, Euridice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacopo_Peri

1913 - Roger Wolcott Sperry, American neurobiologist
Nobel Prize in Medicine (1981) for his work with split-brain research. Split-brain is a lay term to describe the result when the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain is severed to some degree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Wolcott_Sperry