TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – AUG 20
1619 1st known African Americans in English North America (approx. 20) land at Point Comfort (Fort Monroe), Virginia. They are then sold or traded into servitude.
1667 John Milton publishes Paradise Lost, an epic poem about the fall of Adam and Eve.
1741 Danish navigator Vitus Jonas Bering, commissioned by Peter the Great of Russia to find land connecting Asia and North America, discovers America.
1794 American General “Mad Anthony” Wayne defeats the Ohio Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the Northwest territory, ending Indian resistance in the area.
1866 President Andrew Johnson formally declares US Civil War over
1902 Militant Cuban veteran soldiers demanded $85,000,000 from the Cuban government to compensate them for their previous military service. This would take money away from the sugar industry. At Puerto Principe, 5,000 soldiers demanded that President Palma and the Congress find money to pay their salaries.
1908 The American Great White Fleet arrives in Sydney, Australia, to a warm welcome.
1920 The first commercial radio station begins operating in Detroit, Michigan with call sign 8MK (Now WWJ – Newsradio 950).
1940 After a previous machine gun attack failed, exiled Russian Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico City, with an alpine ax to the back of the head.
1940 Radar is used for the first time, by the British during the Battle of Britain. Also on this day, in a radio broadcast, Winston Churchill makes his famous homage to the Royal Air Force: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
1953 USSR publicly acknowledges it tested a hydrogen bomb eight days earlier.
1955 Hundreds killed in anti-French rioting in Morocco and Algeria.
1961 East Germany begins erecting a wall along western border to replace barbed wire put up Aug 13; US 1st Battle Group, 18th Infantry Division arrives in West Berlin.
1964 US President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Economic Opportunity Act, an anti-poverty measure totaling nearly $1 billion, as part of his War on Poverty.
1965 The communist journal, The Kommunist, blasted President Johnson of the U.S. for what it called, “Johnson globalism” and causing a threat to world peace. The journal went on to point out that this kind of globalism would allow the U.S. to be the watch dog of the capitalist world and American intervention whenever U.S. interests were impinged upon.
1978 NASA launches Viking 1; with Viking 2, launched a few days later, provided high-resolution mapping of Mars, revolutionizing existing views of the planets.
1980 UN Security Council condemns Israel’s declaration that all of Jerusalem is its capital; vote is 14-0, with US abstaining.
1982 A multinational force including 800 US Marines lands in Beirut, Lebanon, to oversee Palestinian withdrawal during the Lebanese Civil War.
1986 Part-time mail carrier Patrick Sherrill shoots 20 fellow workers killing 14 at Edmond Okla., the first mass shooting by an individual in an office environment in the US. His actions give rise to the phrase “going postal,” for sudden violent outbursts.
1990 Iraq moves Western hostages to military installations to use them as human shields against air attacks by a US-led multinational coalition.
1996 The Minimum hourly wage is raised to $5.15 an hour an increase of 90 cents.
1998 The Supreme Court of Canada rules Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the federal government’s approval.
1998 US launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the Aug. 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
2002 A group of Iraqis opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein seize the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin; after five hours they release their hostages and surrender.
2009 Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, was released from prison by the Scottish government. He was released on the basis of compassion because he had been diagnosed with a terminal form of prostate cancer. The convict had been sent to prison to serve a life sentence in 2001 after being found guilty of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, which resulted in the deaths of 270 people.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
