TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – AUG 9
480 BC The Persian army defeats Leonidas and his Spartan army at the Battle Thermopylae, Persia.
1173 Construction of the Tower of Pisa begins, and it takes two centuries to complete.
1483 Pope Sixtus IV celebrates the first mass in the Sistine Chapel, which is named in his honor.
1549 England declares war on France.
1790 The Columbia returned to Boston Harbor after a three-year voyage. It was the first ship to carry the American flag around the world.
1814 Andrew Jackson and the Creek Indians sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, giving the whites 23 million acres of Creek territory.
1854 Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, recounting his experiment in solitary life on the shores of Massachusetts’ Walden Pond, was published.
1859 The escalator is patented. However, the first working escalator appeared in 1900. Manufactured by the Otis Elevator Company for the Paris Exposition, it was installed in a Philadelphia office building the following year.
1910 The first complete, self-contained electric washing machine is patented.
1925 Ku Klux Klan members flooded Washington in the thousands in the summer of 1925 Pennsylvania Avenue was awash in white robes and official Klansmen asserted that they had met their quota of 50,000 marchers.
1936 Jesse Owens wins four gold medals in track and field events at the Berlin Olympics.
1941 President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill meet at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The meeting produces the Atlantic Charter, an agreement between the two countries on war aims, even though the United States is still a neutral country.
1944 Fictional character Smokey Bear (“Only you can prevent forest fires”) created by US Forest Service and the Ad Council.
1945 The B-29 bomber Bock’s Car drops a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.
1956 The first statewide, state-supported educational television network went on the air in Alabama.
1974 Gerald Ford is sworn in as president of the United States after the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
1979 England’s first major nude beach established, at the seaside resort of Brighton.
1985 Arthur J. Walker, a retired Navy officer, was found guilty of seven counts of spying for the Soviet Union.
1999 Russian president Boris Yeltsin fires his prime minister and, for the fourth time, fires the entire cabinet.
2001 U.S. President George W. Bush announced he would support federal funding for limited medical research on embryonic stem cells.
2004 Trump Hotel and Casion Resorts announced plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
