TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: AUGUST 23
1244 Turks expel the crusaders under Frederick II from Jerusalem.
1305 Scottish patriot William Wallace is hanged, drawn, beheaded, and quartered in London.
1542 Rabbi Joseph Caro completes his commentary of Tur Code
1711 A British attempt to invade Canada by sea fails.
1863 Union batteries cease their first bombardment of Fort Sumter, leaving it a mass of rubble but still unconquered by the Northern besiegers.
1902 Fanny Farmer, among the first to emphasize the relationship of diet to health, opens her School of Cookery in Boston.
1904 Snow Chains Patented
1914 The Emperor of Japan declares war on Germany.
1927 Immigrant laborers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed for a robbery they did not commit. Fifty years later, in 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis establishes a memorial in the victims’ honor.
1939 Joseph Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sign a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, freeing Adolf Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland.
1942 Battle of Stalingrad: 600 Luftwaffe planes bomb Stalingrad (40,000 die)
1950 Up to 77,000 members of the U.S. Army Organized Reserve Corps are called involuntarily to active duty to fight the Korean War.
1954 First flight of the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.
1966 Lunar Orbiter 1 takes first photograph of Earth from the moon.
1990 President Saddam Hussein appeared on Iraqi state television with a group of Western detainees that he referred to as “guests.” He told the group that they were being held “to prevent the scourge of war.”
1990 Armenia Declares Independence From the Soviet Union
1990 East and West Germany announce they will unite on Oct 3.
1996 Osama bin Laden issues message entitled “A declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places.”
1998 Protestors in Sudan carried a sign that bore the resemblance of Monica Lewinsky and the words “No War for Monika.” The anti-U.S. demonstration was in Khartoum, Sudan
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
