1. On August 19, 1692, five more people were tried and sentenced to death during the Salem Witch Trials. This brought the total number of convicted witches to 19, with many more arrests and trials to come in the following weeks.

2. August 19, 1812, marks the start of the War of 1812 in Massachusetts. British troops landed in Eastport, Maine, and began a months-long siege of the city before ultimately capturing it and several other towns along the Maine coast.

3. The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773, but the seeds of the rebellion were planted months earlier on August 19, when a group of Bostonians gathered to protest the arrival of a new shipment of tea from England. This led to a boycott of British tea and other goods that played a significant role in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War.

4. On August 19, 1957, the Massachusetts Turnpike officially opened to traffic between Route 128 in Weston and Route 9 in Framingham. The highway would eventually span the entire state, connecting Boston to the western border with New York.

5. The town of Concord, Massachusetts, was the site of two significant events on August 19: in 1775, a British scouting party was driven back by the colonials in the first real battle of the Revolutionary War, and in 1839, writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous speech "The American Scholar" at the town's First Parish Church. Both events helped shape the history and culture of Massachusetts and the United States as a whole.