TODAY HISTORY LESSON: MARCH 30
240 BC 1st recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet
1492 King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sign a decree expelling all Jews from Spain.
1533 Henry VIII divorces his 1st wife, Catherine of Aragon
1842 Ether was used as an anaesthetic for 1st time by Dr Crawford Long (Jefferson GA)
1856 Russia signs the Treaty of Paris, ending the Crimean War
1858 Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia patents the pencil with an eraser attached on one end.
1867 Alaska Purchase: US buys Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 ($109 million in 2018), roughly 2 cents an acre
1870 The 15th amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race, passes.
1870 President U.S. Grant signs bill readmitting Texas to the Union, the last Confederate state readmitted.
1909 The Queensboro Bridge in New York opens. It is the first double decker bridge and links Manhattan and Queens.
1909 In Oklahoma, Seminole Indians revolted against meager pay for government jobs.
1916 Mexican bandit Pancho Villa kills 172 at the Guerrero garrison in Mexico.
1946 The Allies seize 1,000 Nazis attempting to revive the Nazi party in Frankfurt.
1950 President Harry S Truman denounces Senator Joe McCarthy as a saboteur of U.S. foreign policy.
1959 Dalai Lama flees China and is granted political asylum in India
1964 Jeopardy! is aired for the first time
1976 Thousands of Palestinians protest against Israel’s massive land expropriation
1981 President Ronald Reagan is shot and wounded in Washington, D.C. by John W. Hinckley Jr.
1984 The U.S. ended its participation in the multinational peace force in Lebanon.
1994 Serbs and Croats signed a cease-fire to end their war in Croatia while Bosnian Muslims and Serbs continued to fight each other.
1999 Suspected Islamic militants set off several grenades at a temple in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Four civilians, four policemen and two attackers were killed and 20 people were injured.
1999 A jury in Portland, Oregon, in a landmark case ordered Philip Morris to pay $81 million to the family of a man who died of lung cancer after smoking Marlboros for four decades.
2007 The military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay has convicted Australian detainee David Hicks for providing material support for terrorism. Hicks accepted a plea deal in exchange for a maximum sentence of seven years in an Australian prison.
2010 The Obama Administration has proposed to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
