1. On August 9, 1850, the first post office in Nevada was established in Genoa, making it the oldest active post office in the state.

2. In 1877, the Nevada State Capitol building was completed in Carson City. It is one of the oldest continuously occupied capitol buildings in the United States.

3. On August 9, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, ending World War II. Many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb were later employed at the Nevada Test Site, where the United States conducted numerous nuclear tests from 1951 to 1992.

4. In 1956, the first flight of a production model of the Lockheed U-2 spy plane took place at Groom Lake, a classified Air Force facility in southern Nevada. The U-2 was used extensively during the Cold War to collect intelligence on the Soviet Union and other countries.

5. On August 9, 1996, Tupac Shakur, a world-famous rapper and actor, was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting on the Las Vegas strip. He died six days later from his injuries. The murder has never been solved.