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.

**2006 - American physicist James Van Allen, who helped propel the United States into the space race and discovered the bands of radiation that surround the Earth that were later named after him, died. He was 91.

REUTERS SG KP1030