TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – AUG 23
1244 Turks expel the crusaders under Frederick II from Jerusalem.
1305 Scottish patriot William Wallace is hanged, drawn, beheaded, and quartered in London.
1775 King George III of England refuses the American colonies’ offer of peace and declares them in open rebellion.
1821 After 11 years of war, Spain grants Mexican independence as a constitutional monarchy.
1833 Britain abolishes slavery in colonies; 700,000 slaves freed
1902 Fanny Farmer, among the first to emphasize the relationship of diet to health, opens her School of Cookery in Boston.
1917 Race riot in Houston Texas (2 blacks & 11 whites killed)
1926 American film star Rudolph Valentino dies, causing world-wide hysteria and a number of suicides.
1927 Immigrant laborers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed for a robbery they did not commit. Fifty years later, in 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis establishes a memorial in the victims’ honor.
1939 Joseph Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sign a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, freeing Adolf Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland.
1950 Up to 77,000 members of the U.S. Army Organized Reserve Corps are called involuntarily to active duty to fight the Korean War.
1953 Captain George C. Davison of Staten Island, New York was thrown into a Korean prison for fifteen days because he penciled a mustache on a picture of Mao Zedong.
1954 First flight of the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.
1966 First Photograph of the Earth Taken From the Orbit of the Moon
1978 In New Delhi, Indira Gandhi went to court facing fraud charges. Gandhi was cautioned by the judge not to leave the country and was freed on $1,875 bail.
1990 East and West Germany announce they will unite on Oct 3.
1990 Armenia Declares Independence From the Soviet Union
1996 Osama bin Laden issues message entitled “A declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places.”
2007 Archaeologist found the remains of two children of the Romanov family, the last tsar of Russia. The two were executed in 1918 during the Bolshevik revolution. DNA testing later confirmed the children were fourteen year old Alexei and one of his sisters.
2011 Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi is overthrown after National Transitional Council forces take control of Bab al-Azizia compound during the 2011 Libyan Civil War.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
