TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MAY 10
1285 Philip III of Spain is succeeded by Philip IV (“the Fair”).
1503 Christopher Columbus discovers the Cayman Islands.
1676 Bacon’s Rebellion begins in the New World.
1768 The imprisonment of the journalist John Wilkes as an outlaw provoked violence in London. Wilkes was returned to parliament as a member for Middlesex.
1773 To keep the troubled East India Company afloat, Parliament passes the Tea Act, taxing all tea in the American colonies.
1774 Louis XVI succeeds his father Louis XV as King of France.
1775 Ethan Allen and Colonel Benedict Arnold led an attack on the British Fort Ticonderoga and captured it from the British.
1775 Second Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and issues paper currency for 1st time
1794 Elizabeth, the sister of King Louis XVI, is beheaded.
1801 First Barbary War: The Barbary pirates of Tripoli declare war on the United States of America (1st US foreign war)
1840 Mormon leader Joseph Smith moves his band of followers to Illinois to escape the hostilities they experienced in Missouri.
1865 Union cavalry troops capture Confederate President Jefferson Davis near Irvinville, Georgia.
1869 The Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads meet in Promontory, Utah.
1872 Victoria Woodhull becomes first the woman nominated for U.S. president.
1908 The first Mother’s Day observance took place during a church service in Grafton, West Virginia.
1917 Allied ships get destroyer escorts to fend off German attacks in the Atlantic.
1924 J. Edgar Hoover is appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
1933 Nazis begin burning books by “unGerman” writers such as Heinrich Mann and Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front.
1940 German forces begin a blitzkrieg of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, skirting France’s “impenetrable” Maginot Line.
1940 Winston Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister.
1941 Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, parachutes into Scotland to broker a peace agreement
Hess was captured and interrogated. He was the last in a long line of prominent figures to be incarcerated in the Tower of London. Hitler characterized his peace mission four years before the end of World War II as treason.
1943 U.S. troops invaded Attu in the Aleutian Islands to expel the Japanese.
1946 Winston Churchill has made a speech urging a United States of Europe including Germany as he believes this will help to create a common bond between Europeans and for future trade.
1960 The USS Nautilus completes the first circumnavigation of the globe underwater.
1970 Vice President Agnew has accused the television networks of manufacturing the news for the sake of sensationalism with regards to the War in Vietnam
1986 Navy Lt. Commander Donnie Cochran became the first black pilot to fly with the Blue Angels team.
1994 John Wayne Gacy ( The Killer Clown ) is executed in Illinois for the murders of 33 young men and boys he had raped and murdered between 1972 and his arrest in 1978.
2001 In Ghana, 121 people were killed in a stampede at a soccer game.
2002 Robert Hanssen was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole. Hanssen, an FBI agent, had sold U.S. secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
