TODAY HISTORY LESSON: MAY 10
1267 Vienna’s church orders all Jews to wear a distinctive garb
1497 Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci leaves for his first voyage to the New World (disputed)
1676 Bacon’s Rebellion, frontiersmen vs Virginia Government begins
1768 The imprisonment of the journalist John Wilkes as an outlaw provoked violence in London. Wilkes was returned to parliament as a member for Middlesex.
1773 To keep the troubled East India Company afloat, Parliament passes the Tea Act, taxing all tea in the American colonies.
1775 Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British.
1794 Elizabeth, the sister of King Louis XVI, is beheaded.
1801 First Barbary War: The Barbary pirates of Tripoli declare war on the United States of America (1st US foreign war)
1840 Mormon leader Joseph Smith moves his band of followers to Illinois to escape the hostilities they experienced in Missouri.
1857 Indian mutiny against rule by the British East India Company begins with the revolt of the Sepoy soldiers in Meerut
1865 Union cavalry troops capture Confederate President Jefferson Davis near Irvinville, Georgia.
1869 Central Pacific and Union Pacific Rail Roads meet in Promontory, UT. A golden spike was driven in at the celebration of the first transcontinental railroad in the U.S.
1872 Victoria Woodhull becomes first the woman nominated for U.S. president.
1924 J. Edgar Hoover is appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
1933 Nazis begin burning books by “unGerman” writers such as Heinrich Mann and Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front.
1941 Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, parachutes into Scotland to broker a peace agreement
Hess was captured and interrogated. He was the last in a long line of prominent figures to be incarcerated in the Tower of London. Hitler characterized his peace mission four years before the end of World War II as treason.
1944 Smith v Allwright (excluding Blacks from primary voting) is illegal
1954 Bill Haley releases “Rock Around the Clock”. It was the first rock song to top the Billboard charts and has become a classic of the early rock era.
1962 Marvel Comics published the first issue of “The Incredible Hulk.”
1969 Apollo 10 transmit 1st color pictures of Earth from space
1989 General Manuel Noriega’s Government nullifies country’s elections, which the opposition had won by a 3-1 margin
1992 Bible Land Museum opens in Jerusalem Israel
1994 Nelson Mandela becomes South Africa’s first black president
2002 Robert Hanssen was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole. Hanssen, an FBI agent, had sold U.S. secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds.
2002 Dr. Pepper announced that it would be introducing a new flavor, Red Fusion, for the first time in 117 years.
2016 NASA announced that it’s Kepler mission had verified 1,284 new planets. This was the single largest finding of planets to date.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
