TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: OCT 6
1014 The Byzantine Emperor Basil earns the title “Slayer of Bulgers” after he orders the blinding of 15,000 Bulgerian troops.
1536 William Tyndale, the English translator of the New Testament, is strangled and burned at the stake for heresy at Vilvorde, France.
1683 The first Mennonites arrived in America aboard the Concord. The German and Dutch families settled in an area that is now a neighborhood in Philadelphia, PA.
1781 Americans & French begin siege of Cornwallis at Yorktown; last battle of the Revolutionary War
1847 Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre is published in London.
1863 Dr Charles H Sheppard opens the 1st public bath, in Brooklyn
1866 The Reno brothers–Frank, John, Simeon and William–commit the country’s first train robbery near Seymore, Indiana netting $10,000.
1880 The National League kicked the Cincinnati Reds out for selling beer.
1908 Bosnian crisis. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary declared the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been nominally under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.
1917 Battle of Passchendaele: Canadian troops capture the village of Passchendaele in the Third Battle of Ypres, after 250,000 casualties on both sides
1927 The first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, opens with popular entertainer Al Jolson singing and dancing in black-face. By 1930, silent movies were a thing of the past.
1939 Adolf Hitler announces plans to regulate Jewish problem
1948 Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey finds the first partial fossil skull of Proconsul africanus, an ancestor of apes and humans on Rusinga Island, Kenya
1949 Japanese-American broadcaster, Iva Toguri D’Aquino (Tokyo Rose), was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000 for treason.
1949 U.S. president Harry Truman signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Act. The act provided $1.3 billion in the form of military aid to NATO countries.
1961 U.S. president John F. Kennedy advised American families to build or buy bomb shelters to protect them in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
1965 Patricia Harris takes post as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, becoming the first African American U.S. ambassador.
1973 Israel is taken by surprise when Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan attack on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, beginning the Yom Kippur War.
1976 Pres Ford says there is “no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe”
1979 President Jimmy Carter received Pope John Paul II, the first pope to visit the White House.
1981 Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat is assassinated in Cairo by Islamic fundamentalists. He is succeeded by Vice President Hosni Mubarak.
1992 Ross Perot appeared in his first paid broadcast on CBS-TV after entering the U.S. presidential race.
1995 Astronomers discover 51 Pegasi is the second star known to have a planet orbiting it.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
