TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 17
858 Benedict III ends his reign as Catholic Pope.
1492 Christopher Columbus signs a contract with Spain to find a western route to the Indies.
1521 Martin Luther faces charges for his revolutionary religious writings The German monk was a leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. As a result of the hearing before the Diet of Worms, he was excommunicated and declared an outlaw.
1524 Present-day New York Harbor is discovered by Giovanni da Verrazzano.
1704 John Campbell published what would eventually become the first successful American newspaper. It was known as the Boston “News-Letter.”
1758 Frances Williams, the first African-American to graduate from a college in the western hemisphere, publishes a collection of Latin poems.
1824 Russia abandons all North American claims south of 54′ 40′.
1853 US Marine Hospital at the Presidio established.
1861 Virginia becomes the eighth state to secede from the Union.
1864 General Ulysses Grant bans the trading of prisoners.
1865 Mary Surratt is arrested as a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.
1932 A mob of western Kansas Farmers today went back to old fashioned justice when they lynched a man who admitted killing an 8 year old girl by overpowering the sheriff and hanging the man from a tree in Kansas.
1937 Daffy Duck made his debut in Porky’s Duck Hunt.
1951 The crew of the British submarine “Affray” is feared dead after going missing off the south coast of England. Two months later, the Affray was found in 300 ft of water 46 miles south of Portland.
1961 Some 1,400 Cuban exiles attack the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
1964 The Ford Motor Co. unveiled its new Mustang model at the New York World’s Fair on This Day 1964.
1967 The U.S. Supreme Court barred Muhammad Ali’s request to be blocked from induction into the U.S. Army.
1969 Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
1970 Apollo 13–originally scheduled to land on the moon–lands back safely on Earth after an accident.
1978 Mir Akbar Khyber’s assassination triggers a communist coup in Afghanistan The Communists introduced a series of reforms, such as equal rights for women and universal education. These achievements were undone soon after by the outbreak of several wars.
1983 In Warsaw, police rout 1,000 Solidarity supporters.
1984 In London, demonstrators outside the Libyan Embassy were fired upon from someone inside. Eleven people were injured and an English Police woman was killed.
1985 The US Government has announced a campaign to increase awareness of Organ Donation hoping to make the donation of organs as widespread as the giving of blood this follows similar campaigns from other countries around the world as organ transplants become more common.
1986 John McCarthy, a British TV journalist, is abducted on his way to the airport in the war-torn capital of Lebanon, Beirut. On August 8th 1991 having spent more than five years held captive by militant group Islamic Jihad, John McCarthy is released making him Britain’s longest-held hostage in Lebanon.
1986 The world’s longest war ends without a single shot having been fired The state of war between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly had been extended for a total of 335 years by the lack of a peace treaty. Some historians doubt that war had ever been declared.
1993 A federal jury in Los Angeles convicted two former police officers of violating the civil rights of beaten motorist Rodney King. Two other officers were acquitted.
1999 A nail bomb outside a busy supermarket in Brixton, south London, has injured dozens. This was the fist in a series of bombs planted by a right-wing extremist David Copeland, 22, who was captured after a nail bomb in a central London pub killed three people.
2010 George Washington is said to have racked up $300,000 in late fees for failing to return two books to a Manhattan library. The first President had borrowed them from the New York Society Library on E. 79th St. in 1789 and never returned them.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
