TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: AUGUST 13
1521 Hernan Cortes captures the city of Tenochtitlan, Mexico, and sets it on fire.
1642 Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovers Martian south polar cap
1680 War starts when the Spanish are expelled from Santa Fe, New Mexico, by Indians under Chief Pope.
1889 The first coin-operated telephone is patented by William Gray.
1892 The first issue of the Afro American newspaper is published in Baltimore, Maryland.
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
1937 Second Sino-Japanese War: Japanese forces begin the Battle of Shanghai, a conflict that will last 3 months and involve 1 million troops
1942 Henry Ford unveiled his “Soybean Car.” It was a plastic-bodied car that weighed about 1000 lbs. less than a steel car.
1945 35 Jews sacrifice their lives to blow up Nazi rubber plant in Silesia
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.
1978 Bomb attack in Beirut during Second Lebanese Civil War kills more than 150 people.
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.
1990 Iraq transferred $3-4 billion in bullion, currency, and other goods seized from Kuwait to Baghdad.
1993 US Court of Appeals rules Congress must save all emails.
1997 South Park Makes its Debut on Comedy Central
2006 Tokyo faced an accidental blackout which lasted for a few hours on this day.
2013 The US state of California became the first state to created rights in law for transgender schoolchildren
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
