TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 18
310 St. Eusebius of Vercelli begins his reign as Catholic Pope.
1025 Bolesław Chrobry is crowned in Gniezno, becoming the first King of Poland
1521 Martin Luther confronts the emperor Charles V, refusing to retract the views which led to his excommunication.
1775 American revolutionaries Paul Revere, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott rode though the towns of Massachusetts giving the warning that the Regulars were coming out. Later, the phrase “the British are coming” was attributed to Revere even though it is unlikely he used that wording.
1783 Fighting ceases in the American Revolution, eight years to the day when it began
1791 National Guardsmen prevent Louis XVI and his family from leaving Paris.
1818 A regiment of Indians and blacks is defeated at the Battle of Suwannee, in Florida, ending the First Seminole War.
1846 The telegraph ticker was patented by R.E. House
1847 U.S. forces defeat Mexicans at Cerro Gordo in one of the bloodiest battle of the Mexican-American War.
1861 Colonel Robert E. Lee turns down an offer to command the Union armies.
1877 Charles Cros wrote a paper that described the process of recording and reproducing sound. In France, Cros is regarded as the inventor of the phonograph. In the U.S., Thomas Edison gets the credit.
1906 A massive earthquake hits San Francisco, measuring 8.25 on the Richter scale.
1937 Leon Trotsky calls for the overthrow of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
1949 The Republic of Ireland withdraws from British Commonwealth.
1954 Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser seizes power in Egypt.
1956 Rainier III marries Grace Kelly The wedding celebrations for the Prince of Monaco and the glamorous U.S. actress were broadcast around the world and enthused the population of war-torn Europe.
1968 London Bridge was sold to an American. It was rebuilt in Arizona.
1974 The secretary of the United Nations warns the world could be heading for a recession caused by the underlying increase of the price of oil causing trade deficits in the western world.
1978 The U.S. Senate approves the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama.
1983 A suicide bomber kills U.S. Marines at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon.
1985 Ted Turner filed for a hostile takeover of CBS.
1996 Egyptian gunmen open fire on a group of tourists outside the Europa Hotel in Cairo, killing Seventeen Greek tourists and an Egyptian tour guide.
2002 Afghanistan’s former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, returned after 29 years in exile.
2007 At least 172 people, including women and children, have been killed in a spate of bombs in Baghdad. The deadliest bombing was a Sunni car-bomb that exploded close to a market in central Baghdad’s al-Sadriyah district, which has killed about 122 people.
2008 A Texas District Judge has ruled that the state will be keeping temporary custody of the 416 children that were taken from a polygamous sect’s (Y.F.C.’s ) West Texas compound.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
