TODAY HISTORY LESSON: MARCH 16
597 BC Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king
0037 On a trip to the Italian mainland from his home on Capreae, the emperor Tiberius dies on the Bay of Naples.
1190 Jews of York England commit mass sucide rather than submit to baptism
1521 Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines. He was killed the next month by natives.
1621 The first Indian appears to colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
1641 General court declares Rhode Island a democracy & adopts new constitution
1792 King gustav iii of Sweden is shot by Count Jacob Johan Anckarström at a masked ball at the Opera; he dies on March 29
1802 The U.S. Congress established the West Point Military Academy in New York.
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published.
1867 First publication of an article by Joseph Lister outlining the discovery of antiseptic surgery, in “The Lancet”
1869 Hiram R Revels makes the 1st official speech by a black in the Senate
1907 The British cruiser Invincible, the world’s largest, is completed at Glasgow shipyards.
1915 The Federal Trade Commission began operation.
1916 US & Canada sign Migratory bird treaty
1926 The first liquid-fuel rocket was successfully launched by Prof. Robert Goddard at Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket traveled 184 feet in 2.5 seconds.
1935 Adolf Hitler orders a German rearmament and violates the Versailles Treaty.
1945 Iwo Jima is declared secure by U.S. forces although small pockets of Japanese resistance still exist.
1959 Iraq & USSR sign economic/technical treaty
1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson submits a $1 billion war on poverty program to Congress.
1968 U.S. troops in Vietnam destroy a village consisting mostly of women and children, the action is remembered as the My-Lai massacre.
1977 US President Carter pleads for Palestinian homeland
1978 Italian politician Aldo Moro was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the Red Brigades.
1984 Gunmen kidnap William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut
1985 Associated Press newsman, Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut.
1988 US sends 3000 soldiers to Nicaragua’s neighbor Honduras
1988 A poison gas attack kills 5000 civilians in the Kurdish town of Halabjah. The war crime was in all likelihood executed on the orders of Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein.
1988 Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North and Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter of the National Security Council are indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States for their role in the Iran-contra affair.
1988 Mickey Thompson and his wife Trudy were shot to death in their driveway. Thompson, known as the “Speed King,” set nearly 500 auto speed endurance records including being the first person to travel more than 400 mph on land.
1994 Tonya Harding pled guilty in Portland, OR, to conspiracy to hinder prosecution for covering up the attack on her skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. She was fined $100,000. She was also banned from amateur figure skating.
1995 Mississippi House of Representatives ratifies 13th Amendement-formally abolishes slavery
1998 Rwanda began mass trials for 1994 genocide with 125,000 suspects for 500,000 murders.
1999 The 20 members of the European Union’s European Commission announced their resignations amid allegations of corruption and financial mismanagement.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
