TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 30
1492 King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sign a decree expelling all Jews from Spain.
1533 Henry VIII divorces his 1st wife, Catherine of Aragon
1822 Congress combined East & West Florida into Florida Territory
1840 “Beau” Brummell, the English dandy and former favorite of the prince regent, dies in a French lunatic asylum for paupers.
1858 Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia patents the pencil with an eraser attached on one end.
1865 The Treaty of Paris is signed, ending the Crimean War
1867 US buys Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 (2 cents an acre – Seward’s Folly)
1870 The 15th amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race, passes.
1870 Texas becomes last confederate state readmitted to Union
1889 John T Reid opens 1st US golf course (Yonkers NY)
1909 The Queensboro Bridge in New York opens. It is the first double decker bridge and links Manhattan and Queens.
1916 Mexican bandit Pancho Villa kills 172 at the Guerrero garrison in Mexico.
1946 The Allies seize 1,000 Nazis attempting to revive the Nazi party in Frankfurt.
1976 Thousands of Palestinians protest against Israel’s massive land expropriation
1981 President Ronald Reagan is shot and wounded in Washington, D.C. by John W. Hinckley Jr.
1984 US ends participation in multinational Lebanon peace force
1998 The German car maker BMW buys Rolls-Royce cars for $570 million.
1999 A jury in Portland, Oregon, in a landmark case ordered Philip Morris to pay $81 million to the family of a man who died of lung cancer after smoking Marlboros for four decades.
2010 The Obama Administration has proposed to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling.
2010 At least 38 people have been killed and more than 60 injured in two suicide bomb attacks on the Moscow Metro.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
