Reuters historical calendar - August 9

London, Aug 8 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 9 in history: 1902 - Edward VII was crowned King of Great Britain and Ireland at Westminster Abbey, succeeding Queen Victoria, who had reigned for 64 years.

1903 - Following the death of Pope Leo XIII, Giuseppe Sarto was crowned as Pope Pius X before 70,000 people.

1919 - Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Italian composer and librettist famed for his opera ''Pagliacci'', died.

1942 - After the All-India Congress agreed on a ''quit India'' campaign, the British colonial authorities arrested Mahatma Gandhi and 50 others in Bombay.

1945 - The United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, this time on the city of Nagasaki; a wide area was reduced to ashes and more than 70,000 people were killed.

1969 - Actress Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, was found murdered with four others at their house in Beverly Hills, California.

1974 - Gerald Ford was sworn in as 38th president of the United States after Richard Nixon resigned.

1975 - Dmitri Shostakovich, Soviet composer, died. He wrote 15 symphonies as well as operas, ballets and film and theatre scores.

1995 - Jerry Garcia, leader of the Grateful Dead rock band and a leading symbol of the U.S. counter-culture revolution of the 1960s, died.

2000 - Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez arrived on the first visit to Iraq by an elected head of state since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

2004 - Terry Nichols was sentenced to 161 life sentences without parole for the deadly 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in the United States, which killed 168 people.

2005 - Canadian-born Peter Jennings, a high school dropout who rose to become prime-time anchorman for ABC News and whose career spanned five decades, died aged 67.

REUTERS MS BS1009