TODAY HISTORY LESSON: APRIL 16
1457 BC Battle of Megiddo: Egyptian forces of Thutmose III defeat a large Canaanite coalition under King of Kadesh. First battle recorded with a reliable account.
0556 Pelagius I begins his reign as Catholic Pope.
1705 Queen Anne of England knights Isaac Newton.
1746 Jacobite Rising 1745: Battle of Culloden, the last battle on British soil: Royalist troops under the Duke of Cumberland defeat the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart
1818 The U.S. Senate ratifies the Rush-Bagot amendment to form an unarmed U.S.-Canada border.
1861 US President Abraham Lincoln outlaws business with confederate states
1862 Confederate President Jefferson Davis approves a conscription act for white males between 18 and 35.
1905 Andrew Carnegie donated $10,000,000 of personal money to set up the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
1917 Vladimir Lenin returns to Russia to start the Bolshevik Revolution.
1943 In Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hoffman accidently discovered the the hallucinogenic effects of LSD-25 while working on the medicinal value of lysergic acid.
1945 The destroyer USS Laffey survives horrific damage from attacks by 22 Japanese aircraft off Okinawa, earning the nickname “The Ship That Would Not Die.”
1956 1st solar powered radios go on sale
1962 Walter Cronkite begins anchoring CBS Evening News
1964 The Rolling Stones release their debut album
1968 The Pentagon announces the “Vietnamization” of the war.
1972 Two giants pandas arrive in the U.S. from China.
1987 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sternly warned U.S. radio stations to watch the use of indecent language on the airwaves.
1987 The U.S. Patent Office began allowing the patenting of new animals created by genetic engineering.
1990 Supreme Court rejects appeal from retarded man, Dalton Prejean, condemned to death for murdering a Louisiana state trooper in 1977
1992 The House ethics committee listed 303 current and former lawmakers who had overdrawn their House bank accounts.
1993 Jury reaches guilty verdict in Federal case against cop who beat Rodney King, but the verdict is not read until April 17th
2002 The U.S. Supreme Court overturned major parts of a 1996 child pornography law based on rights to free speech.
2003 Treaty of Accession is signed in Athens admitting 10 new member states to the European Union
2007 A male student, Cho Seung-Hui, killed two in a Virginia Tech dorm, then killed 30 more 2 hours later in a classroom building. His suicide brought the death toll to 33, making the shooting rampage the most deadly in U.S. history. Fifteen others were wounded.
2012 The trial of Anders Behring Breivik begins in Oslo. The right-wing extremist had killed 77 people, mostly teenagers, in Oslo with a car bomb and at a youth camp on Utøya island. After doubts about his mental health emerged before the trial, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
