TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 8
876 Charles the Bald is defeated at the Battle of Andernach.
1604 The supernova called “Kepler’s nova” is 1st sighted
1775 Officers decide to bar slaves & free blacks from Continental Army
1855 Arrow, a ship flying the British flag, is boarded by Chinese who arrest the crew, thus beginning the Second Chinese War.
1871 The Great Chicago Fire begins in southwest Chicago, possibly in a barn owned by Patrick and Katherine O’Leary. Fanned by strong southwesterly winds, the flames raged for more than 24 hours, eventually leveling three and a half square miles and wiping out one-third of the city. Approximately 250 people were killed in the fire; 98,500 people were left homeless; 17,450 buildings were destroyed.
1897 Journalist Charles Henry Dow, founder of the Wall Street Journal, begins charting trends of stocks and bonds.
1900 Maximilian Harden is sentenced to six months in prison for publishing an article critical of the German Kaiser.
1906 Karl Ludwig Nessler first demonstrates a machine in London that puts permenant waves in hair. The client wears a dozen brass curlers, each wearing two pounds, for the six-hour process.
1917 Leon Trotsky named chairman of the Petrograd Soviet as Bolsheviks gain control
1918 US Army corporal Alvin C. York kills 28 German soldiers and captures 132 in the Argonne Forest; promoted to sergeant and awarded US Medal of Honor and French Croix de Guerre.
1919 The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives pass the Volstead Prohibition Enforcement Bill.
1921 First live radio broadcast of a football game; Harold W. Arlin was the announcer when KDKA of Pittsburgh broadcast live from Forbes Field as the University of Pittsburgh beat West Virginia University 21–13.
1933 As the nations farmers continue to struggle the National Farmers Union has asked President Roosevelt to intervene and place a moratorium on farm mortgage foreclosures and that farm prices be pegged at the cost of production.
1945 President Harry Truman announced the U.S. would share the secret of the atomic bomb only with Great Britain and Canada.
1962 N Korea reports 100% election turnout, 100% vote for Workers’ Party
1967 Guerrilla Che Guevara captured in Bolivia.
1969 The “Days of Rage” begin in Chicago; the Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society initiate 3 days of violent antiwar protests.
1973 In the Yom Kippur War an Israeli armored brigade makes an unsuccessful attack on Egyptian positions on the Israeli side of the Suez Canal.
1981 Pres Reagan greeted predecessors Jimmy Carter, Gerald R Ford & Richard Nixon before sending them to Egypt for Anwar Sadat’s funeral
1982 The musical Cats begins a run of nearly 18 years on Broadway.
1990 Seventeen Palestinians are shot and killed, and over 100 are wounded, by Israeli police at the Al Aksa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a site sacred to Jews and Muslims.
1991 A slave burial site was found by construction workers in lower Manhattan. The “Negro Burial Ground” had been closed in 1790. Over a dozen skeletons were found.
1993 The U.S. government issued a report absolving the FBI of any wrongdoing in its final assault in Waco, TX, on the Branch Davidian compound. The fire that ended the siege killed as many as 85 people.
2001 US President George W. Bush establishes the Office of Homeland Security.
2002 A federal judge approved U.S. President George W. Bush’s request to reopen West Coast ports, to end a caustic 10-day labor lockout. The lockout was costing the U.S. economy an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion a day.
2008 The National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits to record the spiraling number and two new digits will be added.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
