TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: MAY 15
1213 King John submits to the Pope, offering to make England and Ireland papal fiefs. Pope Innocent III lifts the interdict of 1208.
1252 Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull ad exstirpanda, which authorizes, but also limits, the torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition
1525 German boer army surrounded/slaughters 5,000; ends Boer war
1536 Anna Boleyn & Lord Rochford accused of adultery/incest
1602 English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold discovers Cape Cod
1618 Johannes Kepler discovers his harmonics law.
1718 The world’s first machine gun is patented
1817 First private mental health hospital opens in the US, Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason (now Friends Hospital) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1820 The U.S. Congress designates the slave trade a form of piracy.
1862 Confederate cruiser The Alabama runs aground near London
1862 The U.S. Department of Agriculture was created by an act of Congress on this day.
1862 General Benjamin F Butler issues “Woman’s Order” – women of New Orleans to be treated as whores as a result of their treatment of Union soldiers
1864 At the Battle of New Market, Virginia Military Institute cadets repel a Union attack.
1869 National Woman Suffrage Association forms in New York, founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1897 The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee is founded in Berlin by Magnus Hirschfeld, the first-ever LGBT rights organization
1911 The Standard Oil Company, headed by John D. Rockefeller, was ordered dissolved by the Supreme Court, under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
1918 Pfc. Henry Johnson and Pfc. Needham Roberts receive the Croix de Guerre for their services in World War I. They are the first Americans to win France’s highest military medal.
1928 The first Mickey Mouse film is screened
1930 On a Boeing Air Transport flight between Oakland and Chicago, Ellen Church became the first airline stewardess.
1940 Richard and Maurice McDonald open the 1st McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California
1940 Nylon stockings went on sale for the first time in the United States.
1941 Nazi occupiers in Netherlands forbid Jewish music
1948 Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq invade Israel
1957 Evangelist Billy Graham launches his “crusade” in front of 18,000 people at Madison Square Garden in NYC
1960 Taxes took 25% of earnings in US
1963 The last Project Mercury space flight, carrying Gordon Cooper, is launched.
1972 Gov. George Wallace is shot by Arthur Bremer in Laurel, Maryland.
1972 Ryukyu Island & Daito Island returned to Japan after 27 years of US control
1976 The Ulster Volunteer Force launch gun and bomb attacks on 2 pubs in County Armagh, killing 4 Catholic civilians and wounding many more; a British Army soldier is later convicted for taking part in the attacks
1988 Soviets forces begin their withdrawal from Afghanistan.
1989 Maxwell House coffee runs ads during “Roe vs Wade” movie despite threat of boycott by right to lifers
1999 The Russian parliament was unable a attain enough votes to impeach President Boris Yeltsin.
2008 California becomes the second U.S. state after Massachusetts in 2004 to legalize same-sex marriage after the state’s own Supreme Court rules a previous ban unconstitutional.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
