TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: OCT 26
1774 The first Continental Congress, which protested British measures and called for civil disobedience, concludes in Philadelphia.
1825 The Erie Canal opened in upstate New York. The 363-mile canal connected Lake Erie and the Hudson River at a cost of $7,602,000.
1850 Robert McClure sights the fabled Northwest Passage for the first time (from Banks Island towards Melville Island)
1861 Pony Express (Missouri to California) ends after 19 months
1863 Worldwide Red Cross organized in Geneva
1881 Three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday have a shootout with the Clantons and McLaurys at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory.
1905 Norway signs a treaty of separation with Sweden. Norway chooses Prince Charles of Denmark as the new king; he becomes King Haakon VII.
1916 Margaret Sanger arrested for obscenity (advocating birth control)
1918 Germany’s supreme commander, General Erich Ludendorff, resigns, protesting the terms to which the German Government has agreed in negotiating the armistice. This sets the stage for his later support for Hitler and the Nazis, who claim that Germany did not lose the war on the battlefield but were “stabbed in the back” by politicians.
1949 U.S. President Harry Truman raised the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents an hour.
1955 The Village Voice is first published, backed in part by Norman Mailer.
1957 The Russian government announces that Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the nation’s most prominent military hero, has been relieved of his duties as Minister of Defense. Khrushchev accused Zhukov as promoting his own “cult of personality” and saw him as a threat to his own popularity.
1962 The Soviet Union made an offer to end the Cuban Missile Crisis by taking their missile bases out of Cuba if the U.S. agreed to not invade Cuba and would remove Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
1967 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi crowns himself Emperor of Iran and his wife Farah as empress.
1970 Gary Trudeau’s comic strip Doonesbury first appears.
1975 Anwar Sadat became the first Egyptian president to pay an official visit to the United States.
1977 Last natural case of smallpox discovered in Merca district, Somalia. Considered the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination
1979 South Korean President Park Chung-hee was shot to death by Kim Jae-kyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.
1987 Head of Salvadoran Human Rights Comm assassinated by death squads
1988 Donald Trump bills Mike Tyson $2,000,000 for 4 month advisory service
1988 Roussel Uclaf, a French pharmaceutical company, announced it was halting the worldwide distribution of RU-486. The pill is used to induce abortions. The French government made the company reverse itself two days later.
1993 Deborah Gore Dean was convicted of 12 felony counts of defrauding the U.S. government and lying to the U.S. Congress. Dean was a central figure in the Reagan-era HUD scandal.
1994 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Prime Minister Abdel Salam Majali of Jordan signed a peace treaty in a ceremony attended by President Clinton.
2001 The USA PATRIOT Act signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush, greatly expanding intelligence and legal agencies’ ability to utilize wiretaps, records searches and surveillance.
2002 Russian Spetsnaz storm the Moscow Theatre, where Chechen terrorists had taken the audience and performers hostage three days earlier; 50 terrorists and 150 hostages die in the assault.
2019 Raid by US Special Forces kills ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
