TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – AUG 13
1521 Hernan Cortes captures the city of Tenochtitlan, Mexico, and sets it on fire.
1680 War starts when the Spanish are expelled from Santa Fe, New Mexico, by Indians under Chief Pope.
1792 French revolutionaries took the entire French royal family and imprisoned them.
1831 Nat Turner leads uprising of slaves in Virginia
1889 The first coin-operated telephone is patented by William Gray.
1898 Manila, the capital of the Philippines, falls to the U.S. Army.
1906 An all-black army unit was accused of a shooting rampage that left 1 civilian dead at Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas. In 1972 they were all exonerated.
1918 First Woman enlists in the United States Marines.. After joining the Marine corps, Opha May Johnson, was assigned desk duty at the Marine Corps headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
1920 A roundup by U.S. deputy marshals for 212 draft dodgers was going on in the Chicago area.
1934 Al Capp’s comic strip “L’il Abner” made its debut in newspapers.
1942 Henry Ford unveiled his “Soybean Car.” It was a plastic-bodied car that weighed about 1000 lbs. less than a steel car.
1961 The border between East and West Berlin was closed and marked with a barbed wire fence.
1963 A 17 year-old Buddhist monk burns himself to death in Saigon, South Vietnam.
1989 The wreckage of a plane that carried U.S. congressman Mickey Leland and others on a humanitarian mission is found on a mountain side in Ethiopia; there are no survivors.
1993 US Court of Appeals rules Congress must save all emails.
1997 South Park Makes its Debut on Comedy Central
2013 The US state of California became the first state to created rights in law for transgender schoolchildren.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
