TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MAY 15
1213 King John submits to the Pope, offering to make England and Ireland papal fiefs. Pope Innocent III lifts the interdict of 1208.
1252 Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull ad exstirpanda, which authorizes, but also limits, the torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition
1602 English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold discovers Cape Cod.
1618 Johannes Kepler discovers his harmonics law.
1718 The world’s first machine gun is patented
British lawyer, James Puckle, invented the 25.4 mm caliber “Puckle Gun” for the use on ships. It was designed for two bullet types: round bullets for Christians and (more damaging) square bullets for Turks.
1730 Following the resignation of Lord Townshend, Robert Walpole becomes the sole minister in the English cabinet.
1768 By the Treaty of Versailles, France purchases Corsica from Genoa.
1820 The U.S. Congress designates the slave trade a form of piracy.
1862 The U.S. Department of Agriculture was created by an act of Congress on this day.
1869 National Woman Suffrage Association forms in New York, founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1911 The Standard Oil Company, headed by John D. Rockefeller, was ordered dissolved by the Supreme Court, under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
1916 U.S. Marines land in Santo Domingo to quell civil disorder.
1918 Pfc. Henry Johnson and Pfc. Needham Roberts receive the Croix de Guerre for their services in World War I. They are the first Americans to win France’s highest military medal.
1930 Ellen Church becomes the first airline stewardess.
1940 Nylon stockings from DuPont (Nylon invented in 1935 by Wallace Carothers) went on general sale for the first time in the United States.
1940 The first McDonald’s fast food restaurant opens
Maurice “Mac” and Richard “Dick” McDonald opened McDonald’s Bar-B-Q in San Bernardino.
1942 The United States begins rationing gasoline.
1948 Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq invade Israel
The First Arab-Israeli War was initiated by Israel’s proclamation of independence on the day before the invasion. It lasted nearly 10 months and caused thousands of casualties on both sides.
1970 Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi, were killed when police opened fire during student protests.
1970 U.S. President Nixon appointed America’s first two female generals.
1972 Gov. George Wallace is shot by Arthur Bremer in Laurel, Maryland.
1974 A school hostage situation close to the Lebanese border ends with 16 of the children murdered together with the three Palestinian gunmen who had been holding them hostage. As Israeli troops storm the school the teenagers were attacked with hand grenades by the Palestinians as a last act of defiance
1988 USSR begins withdrawing its 115,000 troops from Afghanistan
1993 Masked French police commandos free six girls and their nursery teacher (Ms. Dreyfus) and shot dead Eric Schmitt who called himself the Human Bomb , ending a two-day hostage crisis at a nursery school in Paris.
2006 A judge formally charges Saddam Hussein with crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein refuses to enter a plea insisting he was still Iraq’s president and the judge had no jurisdiction to charge him. In November he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging, he was hanged on December 30th.
2006 The United States State Department announced it would be restoring diplomatic relations with the North African country of Libya. The State Department also decided to take the country off of their list of countries that sponsor terrorism after being on the list for nearly thirty years.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
