TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – APRIL 26
1514 Copernicus makes his first observations of Saturn.
1607 The British establish a colony at Cape Henry, Virginia.
1655 Dutch West Indies Company denies Peter Stuyvesant’s desire to exclude Jews from New Amsterdam
1721 Smallpox vaccination 1st administrated
1865 John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, was surrounded by federal troops in a barn in Virginia. He was shot and killed, either by the soldiers or by his own hand.
1920 Harlow Shapley and Heber D. Curtis hold “great debate” on the nature of nebulae, galaxies and size of the universe at US National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
1925 Franz Kafka publishes his landmark novel The Trial
1931 New York Yankee Lou Gehrig hits a home run but is called out for passing a runner, the mistake ultimately costs him the home run record.
1959 Cuba invades Panamá
1964 Tanganyika and Zanzibar joined to form Tanzania.
1968 Students seize the administration building at Ohio State University.
1977 New York’s famed disco Studio 54 opens
1986 World’s worst nuclear disaster: 4th reactor at Chernobyl nuclear power station in USSR explodes, 31 die, radioactive contamination reaches much of Western Europe
1994 Germany makes Holocaust denial illegal
2000 Vermont Governor Howard Dean signed the nation’s first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions.
2005 Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
