TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: AUGUST 20
1619 1st known African Americans in English North America (approx. 20) land at Point Comfort (Fort Monroe), Virginia. They are then sold or traded into servitude.
1667 John Milton publishes Paradise Lost, an epic poem about the fall of Adam and Eve.
1741 Danish navigator Vitus Jonas Bering, commissioned by Peter the Great of Russia to find land connecting Asia and North America, discovers America.
1794 American General “Mad Anthony” Wayne defeats the Ohio Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the Northwest territory, ending Indian resistance in the area.
1847 General Winfield Scott wins the Battle of Churubusco on his drive to Mexico City.
1866 It was formally declared by U.S. President Andrew Johnson that the American Civil War was over. The fighting had stopped months earlier.
1940 After a previous machine gun attack failed, exiled Russian Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico City, with an alpine ax to the back of the head.
1940 Radar is used for the first time, by the British during the Battle of Britain. Also on this day, in a radio broadcast, Winston Churchill makes his famous homage to the Royal Air Force: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
1955 Hundreds killed in anti-French rioting in Morocco and Algeria.
1964 US President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Economic Opportunity Act, an anti-poverty measure totaling nearly $1 billion, as part of his War on Poverty.
1968 During the night 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia in response to the Prague Spring
1971 FBI begins covert investigation of journalist Daniel Schorr
1978 NASA launches Viking 1; with Viking 2, launched a few days later, provided high-resolution mapping of Mars, revolutionizing existing views of the planets.
1980 UN Security Council condemns Israel’s declaration that all of Jerusalem is its capital; vote is 14-0, with US abstaining.
1986 Part-time mail carrier Patrick Sherrill shoots 20 fellow workers killing 14 at Edmond Okla., the first mass shooting by an individual in an office environment in the US. His actions give rise to the phrase “going postal,” for sudden violent outbursts.
1990 Iraq moves Western hostages to military installations to use them as human shields against air attacks by a US-led multinational coalition.
1998 US launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the Aug. 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
2010 The last American combat brigade exited Iraq after more than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion began.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
