TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JULY 20
1402 Tamerlane’s Mongols defeat the Ottoman Turks at Angora.
1715 The Riot Act goes into effect in England.
1801 A 1,235 pound cheese ball was pressed at the farm of Elisha Brown, Jr. The ball of cheese was later loaded on a horse-driven wagon and presented to U.S. President Thomas Jefferson at the White House.
1867 Imperial troops in Guizhou, China, kill 20,000 Miao rebels.
1868 Legislation that ordered U.S. tax stamps to be placed on all cigarette packs was passed.
1881 Sioux chief Sitting Bull surrenders to the U.S. Army.
1917 Alexander Kerensky becomes the premier of Russia.
1921 Congresswoman Alice Mary Robertson becomes the first woman to preside over the floor of US House of Representatives
1923 Francisco Villa (Pancho Villa) is assassinated in Parral, Chihuahua, in his car and the assassins were never arrested.
1931 Prime Minister MacDonald of Great Britain is hosting one of the most important conferences since Versailles with 7 of the worlds most important statesman attending, The Conference is to try and help the war stricken Germany get free from the economic catastrophe it is currently facing.
1942 The U.S. Army Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) begins its first training class at Fort Des Moines, Iowa.
1944 Adolf Hitler and 12 of his military and naval leaders were injured when a bomb exploded during a meeting at Hitler’s headquarters in an assassination attempt on Hitler.
1951 King Abdullah of Jordan is assassinated.
1954 Armistice for Indo-China signed, Vietnam separates into North and South
1964 Violence has flared up again in Harlem New York during burial services for those killed during the earlier riots with 14 more hurt. African-American leaders in the community are urging calm but hooligans are continuing to cause damage to property in the area.
1969 Apollo 11 lands on the Moon Carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who would become the first humans to walk on the Moon, the spacecraft safely landed on the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon.
1982 U.S. President Ronald Reagan pulled the U.S. out of comprehensive test ban negotiations indefinitely.
1990 The IRA bombs the London Stock Exchange. The IRA did give a coded warning prior to the bomb detonation and no body was killed or injured.
1997 A crime ring using 60 smuggled deaf Mexicans into the United States to sell trinkets in the subways and airports of New York, Chicago, Boston and other cities has been broken after 2 of the deaf immigrant workers go to a police station and with sign language and interpreters give police the information they need to break the ring and place charges.
2007 United States President George W. Bush signed an executive order that banned the torture of terror suspects. The order was intended to clarify the legal bounds that surround interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency after scandals surrounding the United States’ treatment of detainees suspected of terrorist activities.
2012 Aurora shooting A gunman, James Holmes, opened fire in a movie theater during the premier of the Dark Night Rises in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
