TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – AUG 7
1461 Ming Dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin stages a coup against the Tianshun Emperor
1714 The Battle of Gangut: the first important victory of the Russian Navy during the Great Northern War against Sweden
1782 General George Washington authorizes the award of the Purple Heart for soldiers wounded in combat.
1888 Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia receives a patent for the revolving door.
1906 In North Carolina, a mob defies a court order and lynches three African Americans which becomes known as “The Lyerly Murders.”
1922 The Irish Republican Army cuts the cable link between the United States and Europe at Waterville landing station.
1933 The Iraqi Government slaughters over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Sumail. The day becomes known as Assyrian Martyrs Day.
1934 In Washington, the U.S. Court of Appeals rules that the government can neither confiscate nor ban James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.
1947 The Kon-Tiki expedition headed by Thor Heyerdahl, which had carried a six-man crew aboard a balsa wood raft from Peru 3,770 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean, crashed into a reef in at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on a Polynesian archipelago after being at sea for 101 days since April 28th.
1948 Representative, McDowell a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, claimed that the Truman government shipped 1,300 tons of uranium to the Soviet Union in 1945. McDowell thought that the Soviets had a spy ring sabotaging the United States government and that the uranium was going to be used for military purposes.
1958 he playwright Arthur Miller has been cleared of contempt of court by the Court of Appeals for refusing to provide the names of alleged Communist writers with whom he had attended meetings with in New York in 1947 to the House of Un-American Activities Committee.
1959 The United States launched Explorer 6, which sent back a picture of Earth.
1960 The Cuban Catholic Church condemned the rise of communism in Cuba. Fidel Castro then banned all religious TV and radio broadcasts.
1964 Congress overwhelmingly passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing the president to use unlimited military force to prevent attacks on U.S. forces.
1972 The Ugandan leader, Idi Amin, has ordered most Asians (estimated to be 60,000) to leave the country of Uganda within 90 days or face the consequences.
1973 A U.S. plane accidentally bombs a Cambodian village, killing 400 civilians.
1976 The US Viking 2 spacecraft goes into orbit around Mars.
1981 The Washington (D.C.) Star ceases publication after 128 years.
1990 Operation Desert Shield begins as US troops deploy to Saudi Arabia to discourage Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from invading that country as he had Kuwait.
1998 U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, by terrorists. Some 224 were killed and more than 5,500 injured.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
