TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: OCTOBER 31
1517 Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg in Germany. Luther’s theories and writings inaugurate Protestantism, shattering the external structure of the medieval church and at the same time reviving the religious consciousness of Europe.
1541 Michelangelo Buonarroti finishes painting “The Last Judgement” in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City
1815 Sir Humphrey Davy of London patents miner’s safety lamp
1864 Nevada becomes the 36th state.
1918 Spanish Flu kills 21,000 people in the US in a single week
1941 Mount Rushmore was declared complete after 14 years of work. At the time the 60-foot busts of U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were finished.
1950 Collazo & Torresola attempt to kill Truman in Washington, DC
1961 In the Soviet Union, the body of Joseph Stalin was removed from Lenin’s Tomb where it was on public display.
1968 President Johnson orders a halt to all bombing of North Vietnam
1971 Saigon begins the release of 1,938 Hanoi POW’s.
1983 The U.S. Defense Department acknowledged that during the U.S. led invasion of Grenada, that a U.S. Navy plane had mistakenly bombed a civilian hospital.
1984 Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated in New Delhi by two Sikh members of her bodyguard.
1992 Catholic church regrets its handling of Galileo Galilee’s case. Then Pope John Paul II acknowledged the errors committed by the Catholic Church while dealing with Galileo Galilei in the 17th century.
1992 In Liberia, it was announced that five American nuns had been killed near Monrovia. Rebels loyal to Charles Taylor were blamed for the murders.
1999 Leaders from the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The event ended a centuries-old doctrinal dispute over the nature of faith and salvation.
2002 Former Enron Corp. CEO Andrew Fastow convicted on 78 counts of conspiracy, money laundering, obstruction of justice and wire fraud; the Enron collapse cost investors millions and led to new oversight legislation.
2008 Distribution Video Audio, Inc. shipped its final shipment of VHS tapes to stores. The company was the last major United States supplier of pre-recorded VHS tapes.
2011 The world population reaches 7 billion inhabitants according to the United Nations
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
