TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – DEC 9
536 Having captured Naples earlier in the year, Belisarius takes Rome.
1625 The Treaty of the Hague was signed by England and the Netherlands. The agreement was to subsidize Christian IV of Denmark in his campaign in Germany.
1803 The 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by the U.S. Congress. With the amendment Electors were directed to vote for a President and for a Vice-President rather than for two choices for President.
1854 Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” was published in England.
1861 The U.S. Senate approves establishment of a committee that would become the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War.
1867 The capital of Colorado Territory is moved from Golden to Denver.
1884 Levant M. Richardson received a patent for the ball-bearing roller skate.
1900 The Russian czar rejects Boer Paul Kruger’s pleas for aid in South Africa against the British.
1907 Christmas Seals went on sale for the first time, in the Wilmington, DE, post office.
1908 A child labor bill passes in the German Reichstag, forbidding work for children under age 13.
1917 Turkish troops surrendered Jerusalem to British troops led by Viscount Allenby.
1948 The United States abandons a plan to de-concentrate industry in Japan.
1949 The United Nations takes trusteeship over Jerusalem.
1950 President Harry Truman bans U.S. exports to Communist China.
1950 Harry Gold gets 30 years imprisonment for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II.
1958 In Indianapolis, IN, Robert H.W. Welch Jr. and 11 other men met to form the anti-Communist John Birch Society.
1960 Sperry Rand Corporation unveiled a new computer known as “Univac 1107.”
1965 Nikolai V. Podgorny replaced Anastas I. Mikoyan as president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
1968 NLS (a system for which hypertext and the computer mouse were developed) is publicly demonstrated for the first time in San Francisco.
1975 U.S. President Gerald R. Ford signed a $2.3 billion seasonal loan authorization to prevent New York City from having to default.
1979 The World Health Organization officially certified that after a number of concentrated vaccination campaigns around the world smallpox had been eradicated. Only two infectious diseases have been completely eradicated in history; the other is Rinderpest, which is an infectious disease of cattle that was eradicated in 2011.
1985 In Argentina, five former military junta members received sentences in prison for their roles in the “dirty war” in which nearly 9,000 people had “disappeared.”
1987 West Bank Palestinians launched an intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation.
1987 In the Gaza Strip, an Israeli patrol attacked the Jabliya refugee camp.
1990 The first American hostages to be released by Iran began arriving in the U.S.
1990 Lech Walesa is elected president of Poland.
1992 U.S. Marines land in Somalia to ensure food and medicine reaches the deprived areas of that country.
1992 Clair George, former CIA spy chief, was convicted of lying to the U.S. Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. U.S. President George H.W. Bush later pardoned George.
1993 At Princeton University in New Jersey, scientists produced a controlled fusion reaction equivalent to 3 million watts.
1999 The U.S. announced that it was expelling a Russian diplomat that had been caught gathering information with an eavesdropping device at the U.S. State Department.
2008 Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich is arrested on federal charges, including an attempt to sell the US Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
