TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: JULY 11
1346 Charles IV of Luxembourg is elected Holy Roman Emperor in Germany.
1405 Chinese fleet commander Zheng He sets sail on his first major expedition, to the Spice Islands, leading 208 vessels, including 62 treasure ships with 27,800 sailors
1533 Henry VIII is excommunicated from the Catholic Church by Pope Clement VII.
1740 Jews are expelled from Little Russia by order of Czarina Anne
1786 Morocco agrees to stop attacking American ships in the Mediterranean for a payment of $10,000.
1798 The U.S. Marine Corps was formally re-established by “An Act for Establishing a Marine Corps” passed by the U.S. Congress. The act also created the U.S. Marine Band. The Marines were first commissioned by the Continental Congress on November 10, 1775.
1804 Former vice president Aaron Burr fatally wounded former secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Hamilton died the following afternoon.
1812 US invades Canada (Detroit frontier)
1864 Confederate general Jubal A. Early and his troops attacked Washington, DC. They retreated the next day, ending the Confederate threat to occupy the capital.
1914 Babe Ruth made his major league baseball debut as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.
1934 U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first American chief executive to travel through the Panama Canal while in office.
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird is first published as Atticus
1972 American forces break the 95-day siege at An Loc in Vietnam.
1975 Archaeologists unearth an army of 8,000 life-size clay figures created more than 2,000 years ago for the Emperor Qin Shi Huang.
1977 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work to advance civil rights.
1979 US Skylab enters atmosphere over Australia & disintegrates
1985 Dr. H. Harlan Stone announced that he had used zippers for stitches on 28 patients. The zippers were used when he thought he may have to re-operate.
1989 President Ronald Reagan sportscasts the All Star Game
1995 Full diplomatic relations are established between the United States and Vietnam.
1995 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men are massacred when Bosnian Serbs overrun the UN ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica
2006 Mumbai train bombings. Over 200 people were killed and about 700 people were injured in a series of bombings on Mumbai city trains.
2011 The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, closes after several allegations that the paper’s journalists hacked into voicemail accounts belonging to not only a 13-year-old murder victim, but also the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
