TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: Aug 7
1461 Ming Dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin stages a coup against the Tianshun Emperor
1620 Kepler’s mother arrested for witchcraft
1714 The Battle of Gangut: the first important victory of the Russian Navy during the Great Northern War against Sweden
1782 General George Washington authorizes the award of the Purple Heart for soldiers wounded in combat.
1789 Congress established the U.S. War Department.
1882 Hatfields of south WV & McCoys of east Ky feud, 100 wounded or die
1888 Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia receives a patent for the revolving door.
1906 In North Carolina, a mob defies a court order and lynches three African Americans which becomes known as “The Lyerly Murders.”
1933 The Iraqi Government slaughters over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Sumail. The day becomes known as Assyrian Martyrs Day.
1934 In Washington, the U.S. Court of Appeals rules that the government can neither confiscate nor ban James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.
1947 The balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki, which had carried a six-man crew 4,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean, crashed into a reef in a Polynesian archipelago.
1955 Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, begins selling its first transistor radios in Japan
1960 The Cuban Catholic Church condemned the rise of communism in Cuba. Fidel Castro then banned all religious TV and radio broadcasts.
1960 Students stage kneel-in demonstrations in Atlanta churches
1964 Congress overwhelmingly passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing the president to use unlimited military force to prevent attacks on U.S. forces.
1971 Apollo 15 returns to Earth. The mission to the moon had marked the first use of the Lunar Roving Vehicle.
1973 A U.S. plane accidentally bombs a Cambodian village, killing 400 civilians.
1981 The Washington (D.C.) Star ceases publication after 128 years.
1983 Some 675,000 employees strike AT&T
1990 Operation Desert Shield begins as US troops deploy to Saudi Arabia to discourage Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from invading that country as he had Kuwait.
1998 Coordinated bomb attacks in American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya kill over 200 people
2008 War Between Russia and Georgia Breaks Out
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
