TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – FEB 5
1556 Henry II of France and Philip of Spain sign the truce of Vaucelles.
1576 Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV of France) abjures Catholicism at Tours
1631 A ship from Bristol, the Lyon, arrives with provisions for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1811 After George III was declared insane, the Prince of Wales became Prince Regent of England, and later George IV.
1846 The first Pacific Coast newspaper, Oregon Spectator, is published.
1900 The United States and Great Britain sign the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, giving the United States the right to build a canal in Nicaragua but not to fortify it.
1909 The world’s first synthetic plastic is developed Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland announced his invention of Bakelite at a meeting of the American Chemical Society that day.
1914 Henry Ford introduces a revolutionary pay deal when he introduces $5.00 per day wages for all his Ford workers.
1917 U.S. Congress nullifies President Woordrow Wilson’s veto of the Immigration Act; literacy tests are required.
1918 The Soviets proclaim separation of church and state.
1919 United Artists is founded Charlie Chaplin was one of the film studio’s founders.
1922 The Reader’s Digest begins publication in New York.
1937 FDR proposed increasing the number of Supreme Court justices—”packing” the court.
1945 With Japan losing the war and most of the well trained pilots gone a new breed of pilots was born called kamikaze or Suicide Bombers these needed little training and could do great damage taking planes full of explosives and crash them into ships
1947 The Soviet Union and Great Britain reject terms for an American trusteeship over Japanese Pacific Isles.
1949 President Harry S. Truman gave his “fair deal speech”. He expressed his thoughts on how every American should expect a “fair deal” from the U.S. government.
1968 U.S. troops divide Viet Cong at Hue while the Saigon government claims they will arm loyal citizens.
1972 It is reported that the United States has agreed to sell 42 F-4 Phantom jets to Israel.
1972 President Richard Nixon signs a bill authorizing $5.5 million in funding to develop a space shuttle which would represented a giant leap forward in the technology of space travel The first shuttle Columbia is launched in 1981.
1985 U.S. halts a loan to Chile in protest over human rights abuses.
1985 Operation Moses a secret operation by Israel to airlift thousands of Jewish Ethiopian refugees out of Sudan, has been suspended since news of the covert airlift became public.
1993 The 103rd Congress met today to propose action. This action was to take place concerning the re-vitalization of the American economy, which was suffering at this time. Part of this plan of action had lead to the decision of making administrative changes within Congress.
1994 Byron De La Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Medgar Evers, 30 years after the crime in Jackson, Mississippi.
1997 Under international pressure, three of Switzerland’s biggest banks created a fund worth 100 million Swiss francs for Holocaust victims and their families.
2003 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence to the U.N. concerning Iraq’s material breach of U.N. Resolution 1441.
2010 Barack Obama has said the Yemen-linked plot to bomb an airliner over Detroit will not prevent the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay.
2011 The United States House of Representatives is formally taken over by the new Republican majority after the 2010 mid- term elections.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
