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.
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.
1861 US President Abraham Lincoln outlaws business with confederate states
1900 US Post Office issues 1st books of postage stamps
1917 Vladimir Lenin returns to Russia to start the Bolshevik Revolution.
1940 – The first no-hit, no-run game to be thrown on an opening day of the major league baseball season was earned by Bob Feller. The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox 1-0.
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.”
1962 Walter Cronkite begins anchoring CBS Evening News
1964 9 men sentenced 25-30 years for Britain’s 1963 “Great Train Robbery”
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 Howard Stern & Infinity Broadcasting are warned by FCC
1987 The U.S. Patent Office began allowing the patenting of new animals created by genetic engineering.
1990 Maximum New York State unemployment benefits raised to $260 per week
1992 The House ethics committee listed 303 current and former lawmakers who had overdrawn their House bank accounts
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.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
