TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 17
1387 Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” characters begin their pilgrimage to Canterbury (according to scholars)
1492 Christopher Columbus signs a contract with Spain to find a western route to the Indies.
1521 Martin Luther faces charges for his revolutionary religious writings
1524 Present-day New York Harbor is discovered by Giovanni da Verrazzano.
1704 John Campbell published what would eventually become the first successful American newspaper. It was known as the Boston “News-Letter.”
1758 Frances Williams, the first African-American to graduate from a college in the western hemisphere, publishes a collection of Latin poems.
1810 Pineapple cheese was patented by Lewis M. Norton.
1824 Russia abandons all North American claims south of 54′ 40′.
1860 New Yorkers learned of a new law that required fire escapes to be provided for tenement houses.
1861 Virginia becomes the eighth state to secede from the Union.
1864 General Ulysses Grant bans the trading of prisoners.
1865 Mary Surratt is arrested as a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.
1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki is signed ending the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95)
1932 Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia ends slavery
1937 It’s duck season Daffy Duck made his debut in Porky’s Duck Hunt.
1941 Office of Price Administration established (to handle rationing)
1961 Some 1,400 Cuban exiles attack the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
1967 The U.S. Supreme Court barred Muhammad Ali’s request to be blocked from induction into the U.S. Army.
1969 Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
1975 Khmer Rouge forces capture the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh.
1978 63,500,000 shares traded on New York stock exchange (record)
1982 Proclamation of the Constitution Act by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
1984 In London, demonstrators outside the Libyan Embassy were fired upon from someone inside. Eleven people were injured and an English Police woman was killed.
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 by the lack of a peace treaty. Some historians doubt that war had ever been declared
2002 Four Canadian Forces soldiers are killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire from two United States Air Force F-16s, the first deaths in a combat zone for Canada since the Korean War
2013 15 people are killed and 100 are injured after a fertilizer plant explodes in West, Texas
2018 Protests across India at the rape and murder of an 8-year old Muslim girl in Kathua, Bengalu
2019 Terror alert closes schools in Denver, Colorado, due to 18 year-old woman obsessed with Columbine massacre, who is then found dead
2019 10 babies with “bubble boy disease” cured using a gene therapy made from HIV at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, according to new study
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
