TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 16
597 BC Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king
1190 Jews of York England commit mass sucide rather than submit to baptism
1521 Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines.
1792 King gustav iii of Sweden is shot by Count Jacob Johan Anckarström at a masked ball at the Opera; he dies on March 29
1830 London’s re-organised police force (Scotland Yard) forms
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published.
1907 The British cruiser Invincible, the world’s largest, is completed at Glasgow shipyards.
1915 The Federal Trade Commission was organized following the Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914.
1926 Physicist Robert H. Goddard launches the first liquid-fuel rocket.
1935 Adolf Hitler orders German re-armament in violation of The Treaty of Versailles
1953 The U.S. Supreme Court gave power to enforce right-to-work laws to the state of Virginia.
1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson submits a $1 billion war on poverty program to Congress.
1965 Doctor William K. Kerr of the Toronto’s Department of Surgery reported the first ever biochemical link between cancer and cigarettes.
1968 U.S. troops in Vietnam destroy a village consisting mostly of women and children, the action is remembered as the My-Lai massacre.
1978 Italian politician Aldo Moro was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the Red Brigades.
1984 Gunmen kidnap William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut
1985 Associated Press newsman, Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut.
1988 Thousands of people are killed in a poison gas attack cocktail which included mustard gas, the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX and possibly cyanide on the Kurdish city of Halabja in northern Iraq. The attack was believed to have been carried out by Iraq forces on the orders of Saddam Hussein.
2006 The Senate has voted to raise the national debt ceiling to nearly 9 trillion dollars. This might prevent the first ever default on U.S. Treasury notes.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
