TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – SEPT 16
1620 The Mayflower departed from Plymouth, England. The ship arrived at Provincetown, MA, on November 21st and then at Plymouth, MA, on December 26th. There were 102 passengers onboard.
1810 Mexico issues Grito de Dolores, calling for the end of Spanish rule (Mexican Independence Day)
1848 Slavery abolished in all French territories
1889 Robert Younger, in Minnesota’s Stillwater Penitentiary for life, dies of tuberculosis. Brothers Cole and Bob remain in the prison.
1893 Some 50,000 “Sooners” claim land in the Cherokee Strip during the first day of the Oklahoma land rush.
1906 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen discovers the Magnetic South Pole
1908 General Motors Corporation is founded in Flint, Michigan by William C. Durant and Charles Stewart Mott
1919 The American Legion was incorporated by an act of Congress.
1920 Thirty people are killed in a terrorist bombing in New York’s Wall Street financial district.
1934 Anti-Nazi Lutherans stage protest in Munich.
1940 Congress passes the Selective Service Act, which calls for the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.
1974 Limited amnesty is offered to Vietnam-era draft resisters who would now swear allegiance to the United States and perform two years of public service.
1978 25,000 die in 7.7 earthquake in Tabar, Iran
1982 In west Beirut, the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children began in refugee camps of the Lebanese Christian militiamen.
1990 An eight-minute videotape of an address by U.S. President George H.W. Bush was shown on Iraqi television. The message warned that action of Saddam Hussein could plunge them into a war “against the world.”
1991 The trial of Manuel Noriega, deposed dictator of Panama, begins in the United States.
1994 Britain’s government lifts the 1988 broadcasting ban against member of Ireland’s Sinn Fein and Irish paramilitary groups.
2007 Military contractors in the employ of Blackwater Worldwide allegedly kill 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, further straining relations between the US and the people of Iraq.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
