TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 17
1387 Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” characters begin their pilgrimage to Canterbury (according to scholars)
1421 Dikes at Dort Holland breaks, 100,000 drown
1521 Martin Luther faces charges for his revolutionary religious writings
1524 Present-day New York Harbor is discovered by Giovanni da Verrazzano.
1758 Frances Williams, the first African-American to graduate from a college in the western hemisphere, publishes a collection of Latin poems.
1808 Bayonne Decree by Napoleon Bonaparte of France orders seizure of U.S. ships.
1824 Russia abandons all North American claims south of 54′ 40′.
1853 US Marine Hospital at Presidio (San Francisco) established
1861 Virginia becomes the eighth state to secede from the Union.
1865 Mary Surratt is arrested as a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.
1875 “Snooker” (variation of pool) invented by Sir Neville Chamberlain
1907 11,745 immigrants arrive at Ellis Island NY
1937 Daffy Duck made his debut in Porky’s Duck Hunt.
1951 The crew of the British submarine “Affray” is feared dead after going missing off the south coast of England. Two months later, the Affray was found in 300 ft of water 46 miles south of Portland.
1961 Some 1,400 Cuban exiles attack the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
1964 The Ford Motor Co. unveiled its new Mustang model at the New York World’s Fair on This Day 1964.
1969 Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
1978 Mir Akbar Khyber’s assassination triggers a communist coup in Afghanistan
1986 The world’s longest war ends without a single shot having been fired The state of war between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly had been extended for a total of 335 years
1993 Police officers found guilty of violating Rodney King’s civil rights
1999 A nail bomb outside a busy supermarket in Brixton, south London, has injured dozens. This was the fist in a series of bombs planted by a right-wing extremist David Copeland
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
