TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 16
597 BC Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king
37 On a trip to the Italian mainland from his home on Capreae, the emperor Tiberius dies on the Bay of Naples.
1190 The Crusades begin the massacre of Jews in York, England.
1521 Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines. He was killed the next month by natives.
1621 Samoset walked into the settlement of Plymouth Colony, later Plymouth, MA. Samoset was a native from the Monhegan tribe in Maine who spoke English.
1802 The U.S. Congress established the West Point Military Academy in New York.
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published.
1915 The Federal Trade Commission began operation.
1918 The Sedition Act is passed by the U.S. Congress, creating more harsh penalties aimed at people who were against American participation in World War I.
1926 Physicist Robert H. Goddard launches the first liquid-fuel rocket.
1935 Adolf Hitler orders a German rearmament and violates the Versailles Treaty.
1943 Resistance in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw has ended as SS Police and Wehrmacht units using tanks and other armored vehicles take back control of the ghetto crushing resistance after 1 month of fighting.
1954 CBS introduces The Morning Show hosted by Walter Cronkite to compete with NBC’s Today Show.
1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson submits a $1 billion war on poverty program to Congress.
1968 U.S. troops in Vietnam destroy a village consisting mostly of women and children, the action is remembered as the My-Lai massacre.
1969 Rioting and protests against the war in Vietnam continue on campuses throughout California with local National Guardsman patrolling Berkeley campus of the University of California area with fixed bayonets to keep peace and order.
1974 Israeli planes bomb 7 Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon killing at least 27 people and leaving 138 injured.
1984 William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was kidnapped by gunmen. He died while in captivity.
1985 U.S. journalist Terry Anderson was kidnapped in Beirut; he was not released until December 4, 1991 after 2454 days in captivity.
1988 The Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has declared that Nicotine is a as addictive as Heroin and Cocaine and that all cigarette packets should carry a public health warnin
1988 A poison gas attack kills 5000 civilians in the Kurdish town of Halabjah The war crime was in all likelihood executed on the orders of Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein.
1988 Indictments were issued for Lt. Colonel Oliver North, Vice Admiral John Poindexter of the National Security Council, and two others for their involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
1994 Russia agreed to phase out production of weapons-grade plutonium.
1998 Rwanda began mass trials for 1994 genocide with 125,000 suspects for 500,000 murders.
1999 The 20 members of the European Union’s European Commission announced their resignations amid allegations of corruption and financial mismanagement
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