TODAY’S 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.
556 Pelagius I begins his reign as Catholic Pope.
1065 The Norman Robert Guiscard takes Bari, ending five centuries of Byzantine rule in southern Italy.
1705 Queen Anne of England knights Isaac Newton.
1818 The U.S. Senate ratifies the Rush-Bagot amendment to form an unarmed U.S.-Canada border.
1862 Confederate President Jefferson Davis approves a conscription act for white males between 18 and 35.
1866 Nitroglycerine at the Wells Fargo & Co. office explodes.
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.
1922 The Prohibition Department is to enforce the law making it illegal to manufacture beer or wine in the home for home use, this follows the supreme court that home brewing is illegal.
1943 Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist accidentally consumes LSD-25. After taking the drug, formally known as lysergic acid diethylamide, Dr. Hoffman was disturbed by unusual sensations and hallucinations.
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.”
1968 The Pentagon announces the “Vietnamization” of the war.
1972 Two giants pandas arrive in the U.S. from China.
1974 Israeli and Syrian troops continue fighting along the Golan Heights and Mt Herman for 37th consecutive day of fighting in the middle east.
1975 The Khmer Rouge Rebels won control of Cambodia after a five years of civil war. They renamed the country Kampuchea and began a reign of terror.
1983 Brazil detained four Libyan planes en route to Nicaragua after finding weapons, explosives and ammunition on the planes.
2002 The U.S. Supreme Court overturned major parts of a 1996 child pornography law based on rights to free speech.
2006 Pope Benedict XVI calls for a negotiated solution to the Iran nuclear crisis in his Easter message in St Peter’s Square. “May an honorable solution be found for all parties, through honest and serious negotiations,” he said, whilst affirming Israel’s “right to exist in peace.”
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.
2008 The Supreme Court has rejected a challenge on the use of lethal injections as a means of execution. The Court rejected the case that was made by two death row inmates in the state of Kentucky.
2012 The trial against 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 priso
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
