August 12 in History

Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Egypt, died on August 12, 30 BC, probably by poison rather than the legendary asp bite. She was 39. Her death ended the Ptolemaic dynasty that had ruled Egypt since Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy I seized the throne in 305 BC. Cleopatra had gambled everything on her alliance with Mark Antony to resist Roman expansion, and when his forces collapsed at Actium and Alexandria, she chose death over the humiliation of being paraded through Rome in Octavian's triumph. Egypt became a Roman province, its grain feeding the empire's capital. The country would not have another native ruler until the 20th century.

The Hawaiian flag was lowered from Iolani Palace on August 12, 1898, and the American flag raised in its place during the formal annexation ceremony. The ceremony completed a process that had begun five years earlier when a group of American and European businessmen, backed by U.S. Marines from the USS Boston, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani. President Grover Cleveland had called the overthrow an "act of war" and refused to annex the islands, but his successor William McKinley was more receptive. The Spanish-American War provided the strategic justification: Pearl Harbor was essential as a Pacific naval base. Native Hawaiians, who had submitted a 21,000-signature petition against annexation, were not consulted.

Sue Hendrickson, an amateur paleontologist, spotted three large vertebrae protruding from a cliff face near Faith, South Dakota, on August 12, 1990, while her companions were in town fixing a flat tire. The excavation that followed uncovered the largest, most complete, and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found: over 250 bones representing roughly 90% of the skeleton. A legal battle over ownership followed, involving the FBI, the National Guard, and the landowner, rancher Maurice Williams. The specimen was eventually auctioned at Sotheby's in 1997 for $8.36 million to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where "Sue" remains the most visited dinosaur exhibit in the world.

Cleopatra was the first of her dynasty — descendants of Ptolemy, Alexander's general — to actually learn Egyptian. The Ptolemies had ruled Egypt for 250 years and spoke only Greek. She spoke nine languages and presented herself as the goddess Isis. Her relationships with Caesar and then Antony were political alliances as much as anything; she needed Roman power to hold her throne against her own family. When Octavian's forces arrived and Antony died believing her dead, she chose suicide over appearing in a Roman triumph. The asp story is probably myth. The political calculation was real.

The Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank during a naval exercise in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, after a torpedo propellant leak caused two massive explosions that registered on seismographs across Scandinavia. The first blast had a force equivalent to 100 kilograms of TNT; the second, two minutes later, equivalent to 3 to 7 tons. All 118 crew members died. Twenty-three men survived the initial explosions in a rear compartment and left notes describing their situation. President Putin initially downplayed the disaster, refusing offers of foreign rescue assistance for five critical days while telling the public the submarine was communicating with rescuers. It wasn't. The Kursk disaster exposed the dangerous deterioration of Russia's post-Soviet military.

Ian Fleming served in British Naval Intelligence during World War II and spent those years inventing operations, some of which worked and some of which didn't. The ones that didn't could have been James Bond plots. He started writing the Bond novels in 1952 at his Jamaica estate, partly to distract himself from his impending marriage. He wrote one a year, in January, before returning to London. He didn't think much of them as literature. He thought they were entertaining. He was right about the second part.

Crusader forces under Godfrey of Bouillon crushed a Fatimid Egyptian army at Ascalon on August 12, 1099, just one month after seizing Jerusalem. The Fatimids had dispatched 20,000 troops to reclaim the holy city, but the Crusaders struck first, attacking the Egyptian camp at dawn and routing the army before it could form battle lines. The victory secured the Kingdom of Jerusalem's southern flank and eliminated the immediate threat of Egyptian reconquest. Godfrey, who had refused the title of King of Jerusalem, choosing instead to be called "Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre," died the following year. His brother Baldwin had no such modesty and took the crown, founding a dynasty that held Jerusalem until Saladin recaptured it in 1187.