TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 28
312 Constantine the Great defeats Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maxentius at the Mulvian Bridge.
969 After a prolonged siege, the Byzantines end 300 years of Arab rule in Antioch.
1216 Henry III of England is crowned.
1492 Christopher Columbus sights Cuba and claims it for Spain under the name “Juana”
1636 Harvard College, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, is founded in Cambridge, Mass.
1790 New York gives up claims to Vermont for $30,000
1793 Eli Whitney applies for a patent on the cotton gin, a machine which cleans the tight-clinging seeds from short-staple cotton easily and effectively–a job which was previously done by hand.
1886 The Statue of Liberty, originally named Liberty Enlightening the World, is dedicated at Liberty Island, N. Y., formerly Bedloe’s Island, by President Grover Cleveland
1901 Race riots sparked by Booker T. Washington’s visit to the White House kill 34.
1904 The St. Louis police try a new investigation method: fingerprints.
1919 Over President Wilson’s veto, Congress passes the National Prohibition Act, or Volstead Act, named after its promoter, Congressman Andrew J. Volstead. It provides enforcement guidelines for the Prohibition Amendment.
1922 Benito Mussolini took control of the government of Italy.
1924 Miner M.de Bruin discovers the infant fossil skull, “Taung child” in a lime quarry in Taung, South Africa. Paleoanthropologist Raymond Dart identifies the fossil as a new hominin species, Australopithecus africanus.
1938 Germany expelled about 17000 Polish Jews and sent them to Poland which refused to take them in.
1942 The government has announced that the nationwide rationing of Coffee will begin on November 28th.
1960 In a note to the OAS (Organization of American States), the United States charges that Cuba has been receiving substantial quantities of arms and numbers of military technicians” from the Soviet bloc.
1962 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders Soviet missiles removed from Cuba, ending the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1965 Construction completed on St. Louis Arch; at 630 feet (192m), it is the world’s tallest arch.
1982 The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party wins election, giving Spain its first Socialist government since the death of right-wing President Francisco Franco.
2001 Islamic extremist gunmen burst into a church in eastern Pakistan killing 18 people including children who were at prayer.
2005 Libby “Scooter” Lewis, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, resigns after being indicted for “outing” CIA agent Valerie Plame.
2007 Argentina elects its first woman president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
2012 A truck carrying explosives drove into a Catholic church in Kaduna, Nigeria killing seven and injuring more. While no group claimed the attack it was believed that it could have been by the Boko Haram Islamic militant group that has targeted the city before.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
