TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 13
1250 The Seventh Crusade is defeated in Egypt, Louis IX of France captured
1598 The Edict of Nantes grants political rights to French Huguenots.
1742 George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” performed for the 1st time at New Music Hall in Dublin
1775 Lord North extends the New England Restraining Act to South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. The act forbids trade with any country other than Britain and Ireland.
1860 1st Pony Express reaches Sacramento, California
1861 After 34 hours of bombardment, Union-held Fort Sumter surrenders to the Confederates.
1864 Union forces under Gen. Sherman begin their devastating march through Georgia.
1902 J.C. Penney opens his first store in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
1919 British forces kill hundreds of Indian nationalists in the Amritsar Massacre.
1943 Nazi Germany announces that it has discovered the corpses of 4,443 Polish military officers massacred by Soviet forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, in western Russia. [From MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History]
1943 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, an American Founding Father and the third president of the United States.
1949 The Nuremberg Trials ended with 19 top aids to Adolf Hitler receiving up to 25 years for their part in war crimes against humanity.
1959 A Vatican edict prohibited Roman Catholics from voting for Communists.
1960 The first navigational satellite is launched into Earth’s orbit.
1970 An oxygen tank explodes on Apollo 13, preventing a planned moon landing and jeopardizing the lives of the three-man crew.
1975 At least 17 people are left dead and 30 wounded in an ambush by right-wing Lebanese forces on a bus carrying Palestinians in Beirut. This signals the beginning of 15 years of civil war in Lebanon between The Maronite Christian groups and the Muslim militias.
1976 The U.S. Federal Reserve introduced $2 bicentennial notes.
1984 Christopher Walker was killed in a fight with police in New Hampshire. Walker was wanted as a suspect in the kidnappings of 11 young women in several states.
1984 U.S. President Reagan sent emergency military aid to El Salvador without congressional approval.
1998 Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep, gave natural birth to a healthy baby lamb.
1999 Jack Kervorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Mich., to 10 to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Thomas Youk, 52 who was in the final stages of ALS ( Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s Disease ).
2002 Twenty-five Hindus were killed and about 30 were wounded when grenades were thrown by suspected Islamic guerrillas near Jammu-Kashir.
2005 Eric Rudolph ( also known as the Olympic Park Bomber ), pleads guilty to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics in Atlanta Georgia. Rudolph pleaded guilty to numerous federal and state homicide charges and accepted five consecutive life sentences in exchange for avoiding a trial and the death penalty.
2014 Three people were killed when a man went on a shooting spree at the Jewish Community Campus and a Jewish retirement home in Overland Park.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
