TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 24
1184 BC The Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional date)
1061 Halley’s Comet sparks English monk to predict country’ll be destroyed
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 Library of Congress established
1805 U.S. Marines attack and capture the town of Derna in Tripoli from the Barbary pirates.
1833 A patent is granted for the first soda fountain.
1865 Fire alarm & police telegraph system put into operation (San Francisco)
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.
1898 Spain declares war on United States, rejecting an ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
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.
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.”
1973 Albert Sabin reported that herpesviruses were factors in nine kinds of cancer.
1980 A rescue attempt of the U.S. hostages held in Iran fails when a plane collides with a helicopter in the Iranian desert.
1990 The Hubble Space Telescope is launched into Earth orbit
1995 Package bomb, linked to Unabomber, blows up killing Gilbert B Murray
1997 The U.S. Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. The global treaty banned the development, production, storage and use of chemical weapons.
2005 Joseph Ratzinger is inaugurated as Pope Benedict XVI
2013 1129 people die in Bangladesh in the worst building collapse disaster in modern history
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
