TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 24
1184 BC The Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional date)
858 St. Nicholas I begins his reign as Catholic Pope.
1519 Envoys of Montezuma II attend the first Easter mass in Central America.
1558 Mary, Queen of Scotland, marries the French dauphin, Francis.
1792 Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composes “La Marseillaise”. It will become France’s national anthem.
1800 The Library of Congress is established in Washington, D.C. with a $5,000 allocation.
1833 A patent is granted for the first soda fountain.
1877 Russo-Turkish War, 1877-78: Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire
1877 In the U.S., federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans. This was the end to the North’s post-Civil War rule in the South.
1897 William Price became the first to be named White House news reporter.
1915 Turks of the Ottoman Empire begin massacring the Armenian minority in their country.
1916 Irish nationalists launch the Easter Uprising against British occupation.
1948 The Berlin airlift begins to relieve the surrounded city.
1953 Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
1954 British Security forces round up more than 10,000 men suspected of being Mau Mau rebels who are part a guerrilla movement opposed to white settlers in the East African colony.
1961 President John Kennedy accepts “sole responsibility” for the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
1967 Vietnam War: American General William Westmoreland says in a news conference that the enemy had “gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily.
1968 Leftist students take over Columbia University in protest over the Vietnam War.
1975 The hostage siege West German embassy in Stockholm has ended when a cache of dynamite is detonated by the terrorists, causing the death of at least three people.
1980 A rescue attempt of the U.S. hostages held in Iran fails when a plane collides with a helicopter in the Iranian desert.
1984 Apple released the Apple IIc portable computer costing $1,295.
1990 The Hubble Space Telescope is launched into Earth orbit
Unhindered by the impurities and distortions of Earth’s atmosphere, the 2.4 meter (7.9 feet) aperture telescope has delivered some of the most spectacular images of the far reaches of the Universe.
1993 A massive bomb in a parked Van in Bishopsgate in the heart of the City of London explodes, killing one and injuring more than 40
1997 The U.S. Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. The global treaty banned the development, production, storage and use of chemical weapons.
2003 A U.S. official reported the North Korea had claimed to have nuclear weapons.
2005 Joseph Ratzinger is inaugurated as Pope Benedict XVI
The German was considered a particularly conservative Pope – quite unlike his successor, Pope Francis.
2013 Over one-thousand people were killed and more than 2,500 people were injured as a result of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
