TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 22
296 St. Gaius ends his reign as Catholic Pope.
536 St. Agapitus I ends his reign as Catholic Pope.
1500 Pedro Alvarez Cabral discovers Brazil.
1509 Henry VIII ascends to the throne of England upon the death of his father, Henry VII.
1529 Spain and Portugal divide the eastern hemisphere in the Treaty of Saragossa.
1792 President George Washington proclaims American neutrality in the war in Europe.
1864 The U.S. Congress passed legislation that allowed the inscription “In God We Trust” to be included on one-cent and two-cent coins.
1889 The Oklahoma land rush officially starts at noon as thousands of Americans race for new, unclaimed land.
1915 1st military use of poison gas (chlorine, by Germany) in WW I
1931 Egypt signs treaty of friendship with Iraq.
1952 For the first time in history, viewers witnessed live the detonation of an atomic bomb at the U.S. testing site in Yucca Flat, Nevada on Television, The Atomic bomb tested was larger than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
1970 Earth Day was observed yesterday for the first time coordinated by “Denis Hayes” and 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment.
1976 Barbara Walters becomes the first female nightly news anchor on network television.
1980 Following a military coup a number of leading officials including former cabinet ministers of the ousted government in Liberia are publicly executed on the orders of the new military regime.
1983 The West German news magazine Stern publish the first of the Hitler Diaries they had discovered which included 60 volumes of personal diaries purportedly written by Adolf Hitler.
1993 Holocaust Memorial Museum opens in Washington D.C. The Museum is dedicated to documenting, studying, and interpreting the history of the Holocaust and serves as the US official memorial to the millions of Jews and others killed during the Holocaust under directives of Nazi Germany
1995 In Africa, Rwandan troops kill thousands of Hutu refugees in Kibeho.
1997 The Japanese embassy hostage crisis ends after 126 days The hero status of the Peruvian troops involved in the successful raid was later called into question when evidence of summary executions of captured insurgents emerged.
2000 The six year old little boy Elian Gonzalez who survived a shipwreck in which his mother who was trying to enter the US as an illegal immigrant drowned, is taken by a swat team from other Cuban relatives in Miami.
2005 Zacarias Moussaoui ( a French citizen of Moroccan descent ) pleads guilty to conspiring with other al-Qaeda members as part of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
