TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 15
1581 Commissioned by Catherine De Medici, the 1st ballet “Ballet Comique de la Reine” is staged in Paris
1582 The Gregorian (or New World) calendar is adopted in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal; and the preceding ten days are lost to history.
1783 Francois Pilatre de Rozier makes the first manned flight in a hot air balloon. The first flight was let out to 82 feet, but over the next few days the altitude increased up to 6,500 feet.
1813 During the land defeat of the British on the Thames River in Canada, the Indian chief Tecumseh, now a brigadier general with the British Army (War of 1812), is killed
1860 Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, N.Y., wrote a letter to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, suggesting he could improve his appearance by growing a beard.
1883 Supreme Court declares Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional
1892 The U.S. government announced that the land in the western Montana was open to settlers. The 1.8 million acres were bought from the Crow Indians for 50 cents per acre.
1914 Congress passes the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which labor leader Samuel Gompers calls “labor’s charter of freedom.” The act exempts unions from anti-trust laws; strikes, picketing and boycotting become legal; corporate interlocking directorates become illegal, as does setting prices which would effect a monopoly.
1917 Mata Hari, a Paris dancer, is executed by the French after being convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans.
1924 The Chinese Tong Wars in New York and other major cities in the US continue to worsen with Tong leaders attempting to obtain machine guns and many more unsolved murders in the Chinese community.
1935 Emperor Haile Selassie has called for the greatest army ever assembled in Ethiopia to wage a holy war and recapture the sacred city of Aksum back from the Italians.
1949 Billy Graham begins his ministry
1951 Mexican chemist Luis E. Miramontes synthesizes the first oral contraceptive
1964 Nikita Khrushchev is replaced by Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union.
1966 Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale establish the Black Panther Party, an African-American revolutionary socialist political group, in the US.
1966 LBJ signs a bill creating Dept of Transportation
1969 Rallies for The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam draw over 2 million demonstrators across the US, a quarter million of them in the nation’s capital
1987 Fiji becomes a republic ending the islands’ 113 year British Crown sovereignty.
1991 Clarence Thomas is confirmed as Supreme Court Justice (52-48)
1993 Praise for the end of apartheid… Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end apartheid in South Africa.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
