TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MAY 17
1527 Pánfilo de Narváez departs Spain to explore Florida with 600 men – by 1536 only 4 survive
1540 Afghan chief Sher Khan defeats Mongul Emperor Humayun at Kanauj.
1620 1st merry-go-round seen at a fair (Philippapolis, Turkey)
1681 Louis XIV sends an expedition to aid James II in Ireland. As a result, England declares war on France.
1756 Britain declares war on France (7 Years’ or French & Indian War)
1792 The New York Stock Exchange was established when a group of 24 brokers and merchants met by a tree on what is now Wall Street and signed the Buttonwood Agreement.
1803 John Hawkins & Richard French patent the Reaping Machine
1814 Denmark cedes Norway to Sweden.
1845 Rubber band patents
1846 Saxophone is patents by Antoine Joseph Sax
1875 The first Kentucky Derby was held at Churchill Downs, in Louisville, Kentucky.
1881 Frederick Douglass is appointed recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C.
1884 Alaska becomes a US territory
1938 Congress approves Vinson Naval Act, which funds a two-ocean navy
1946 President Truman seizes control of nation’s railroads to delay a strike
1954 The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rules for school integration in Brown v. Board of Education.
1961 Castro offers to exchange Bay of Pigs prisoners for 500 bulldozers
1963 Bruno Sammartino beats Buddy Rogers in New York, to become WWF champion
1973 Televised Watergate hearings opened, headed by North Carolina senator Sam Ervin.
1975 NBC paid $5 million for rights to show “Gone with the Wind” one time
1983 Israel & Lebanon sign a peace treaty
1984 President Reagan has again been denied by the house in his continued requests for the manufacturer of Chemical Weapons, this is the third time his request has been denied by the house.
1987 In the Persian Gulf the American guided missile frigate USS Stark is struck by 2 Exocet missiles fired by an Iraqi aircraft; only one detonates, but 37 sailors are killed and 21 are wounded. Whether the launch was deliberate or a mistake is still debated.
1990 The WHO deletes homosexuality from its list of mental diseases
2000 Two former Ku Klux Klansmen (Thomas E. Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry) were arrested on murder charges for the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls, they were later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
2004 Massachusetts becomes the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage
2008 Spanish police announced that they had arrested five prominent hackers. The hackers, including two sixteen-year-olds, were implicated in hacking government websites in Asia, Latin America, and the United States, as well as over 20,000 other websites.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
