TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: AUG 14
1248 Construction of Cologne Cathedral begun
1281 During Kublai Khan’s second Mongol invasion of Japan his invading Chinese fleet of 3,500 vessels disappears in a typhoon near Japan
1457 The first book ever printed is published by a German astrologer named Faust. He is thrown in jail while trying to sell books in Paris. Authorities concluded that all the identical books meant Faust had dealt with the devil.
1559 Spanish explorer Tristan de Luna enters Pensacola Bay, Florida.
1605 The Popham expedition reaches the Sagadahoc River in present-day Maine and settles there.
1756 French capture Fort Oswego, NY
1842 Second Seminole War declared over by Colonel Worth; Indians go on to be removed from Florida to Oklahoma
1848 Oregon Territory created
1880 The Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, Germany was completed after 632 years of rebuilding.
1900 The European allies enter Beijing, relieving their besieged legations from the Chinese Boxers.
1912 2,500 US marines invade Nicaragua; US remains until 1925
1935 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. The act created unemployment insurance and pension plans for the elderly.
1941 The U.S. Congress appropriated the funds to construct the Pentagon (approximately $83 million). The building was the new home of the U.S. War Department.
1942 Dwight D. Eisenhower is named the Anglo-American commander for Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa.
1945 Japan announces its unconditional surrender in World War II.
1947 Pakistan becomes an independent country.
1953 The whiffle ball was invented.
1958 Canadian Football League plays 1st game (Winnipeg 29, Edmonton 21)
1969 British troops arrived Northern Ireland in response to sectarian violence between Protestants and Roman Catholics.
1971 Stanford prison experiments begin. The controversial Stanford prison experiments to study the effects of authority in a prison setting began.
1980 17,000 workers go on strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland, marking the beginning of the Solidarity movement
1980 People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was incorporated.
1992 The U.S. announced that emergency airlifts of food to Somalia would begin. The action was being taken to stop mass deaths due to starvation.
1995 Shannon Faulker becomes the first female cadet in the long history of South Carolina’s state military college, The Citadel. Her presence is met with intense resistance, reportedly including death threats, and she will leave the school a week later.
1998 A U.S. federal appeals court in Richmond, VA, ruled that the Food and Drug Administration had no authority to regulate tobacco. The FDA had established rules to make it harder for minors to buy cigarettes.
2003 The largest blackout in North American history hit the northeast.
2007 Four coordinated suicide bomb attacks in Yazidi towns near Mosul, Iraq, kill more than 400 people.
2010 The First Youth Olympics Begins
2015 In Havana, Cuba, the U.S. Embassy was re-opened after being closed 54 years earlier.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
