TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – AUG 24
79 Mount Vesuvius erupts destroying Pompeii, Stabiae, Herculaneum and other smaller settlements.
410 German barbarians sack Rome.
1456 The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.
1572 Some 50,000 people are put to death in the ‘Massacre of St. Bartholomew’ as Charles IX of France attempts to rid the country of Huguenots.
1662 Act of Uniformity requires English to accept Book of Common Prayer
1780 King Louis XVI abolishes torture as a means to get suspects to confess.
1814 British troops under General Robert Ross capture Washington, D.C., which they set on fire in retaliation for the American burning of the parliament building in York (Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada.
1894 Congress passes the first graduated income tax law, which is declared unconstitutional the next year.
1912 By an act of Congress, Alaska is given a territorial legislature of two houses.
1949 The North Atlantic Treaty, which established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an intergovernmental military alliance, came into effect on this day.
1954 Congress outlaws the Communist Party in the United States.
1963 US State Department cables embassy in Saigon that if South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem does not remove his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as his political adviser the US would explore alternative leadership, setting the stage for a coup by ARVN generals.
1981 Mark David Chapman sentenced to 20 years to life for murdering former Beatles band member John Lennon.
1985 27 anti-apartheid leaders were arrested in South Africa as racial violence rocked the country.
1989 The U.S. space probe, Voyager 2, sent back photographs of Neptune.
1989 Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti bans Pete Rose from baseball for gambling.
1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Ukraine declares its independence from USSR.
1994 Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) create initial accord regarding partial self-rule for Palestinians living on the West Bank, the Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and Responsibilities.
2001 The remains of nine American servicemen killed in the Korean War were returned to the U.S. The bodies were found about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It was estimated that it would be a year before the identies of the soldiers would be known.
2004 Chechnyan suicide bombers blow up two airliners near Moscow, killing 89 passengers.
2006 Pluto is downgraded to a dwarf planet when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefines “planet.”
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
