TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 12
1455 First record of Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible, letter dated this day by Enea Silvio Piccolomini refers to the bible printed a year before
1496 The Jews are expelled from Syria.
1664 New Jersey became a British colony. King Charles II granted land in the New World to his brother James (The Duke of York).
1789 The United States Post Office is established.
1879 The British Zulu War begins.
1884 Mississippi establishes the first U.S. state college for women.
1894 Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time.
1903 The Czar of Russia issues a decree providing for nominal freedom of religion throughout the land.
1906 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations must yield incriminating evidence in anti-trust suits.
1912 Juliet Low founds the Girl Scouts in Savannah, Georgia.
1933 President Paul von Hindenburg drops the flag of the German Republic and orders that the swastika and empire banner be flown side by side.
1933 President Roosevelt makes the first of his Sunday evening fireside chats.
1938 Hitler invades Austria The occupation of Hitler’s homeland is known as Anschluss, which is the German word for annexation.
1939 Pius XII is elected the new pope in Rome.
1944 Great Britain bars all travel to neutral Ireland, which is suspected of collaborating with Nazi Germany.
1945 Diarist Anne Frank dies in a German concentration camp.
1947 The Truman doctrine is proclaimed In his speech before Congress, U.S. President Harry S. Truman defined his foreign relations priorities, which included military and economic support to Turkey and Greece to prevent the spread of communism there.
1985 The United States and the Soviet Union begin arms control talks in Geneva.
1985 Former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon announced that he planned to drop Secret Service protection and hire his own bodyguards in an effort to lower the deficit by $3 million.
1989 About 2,500 veterans and supporters marched at the Art Institute of Chicago to demand that officials remove an American flag placed on the floor as part of an exhibit.
1994 Church of England ordains 1st 33 women priests
1998 Astronomers cancelled a warning that a mile-wide asteroid might collide with Earth saying that calculations had been off by 600,000 miles.
2002 U.S. homeland security chief Tom Ridge unveiled a color-coded system for terror warnings.
2003 In Utah, Elizabeth Smart was reunited with her family nine months after she was abducted from her home. She had been taken on June 5, 2002, by a drifter that had previously worked at the Smart home.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
