TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – DEC 10
1258 Hulagu, a Mongol leader, seizes Baghdad, bringing an end to the Abbasid caliphate.
1520 Martin Luther publicly burns papal edict demanding he recant
1763 The Treaty of Paris ends the French-Indian War. France gives up all her territories in the New World except New Orleans and a few scattered islands.
1799 Metric system first adopted in France
1814 Napoleon personally directs lightning strikes against enemy columns advancing toward Paris, beginning with a victory over the Russians at Champaubert.
1817 Mississippi became the 20th state in the United States.
1846 Led by religious leader Brigham Young, the first Mormons begin a long westward exodus from Nauvoo, Il., to Utah.
1898 Spanish-American War formally ended by the Treaty of Paris; US acquires Philippines, Puerto Rico & Guam
1901 The start of the Nobel Prize… The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.
1915 President Wilson blasts the British for using the U.S. flag on merchant ships to deceive the Germans.
1958 University of Pittsburgh agrees to buy Forbes Field from the Pirates
1960 Adolph Coors, the beer brewer, is kidnapped in Golden, Colo.
1966 Protester David Miller is convicted of burning his draft card.
1978 In Oslo, Menachem Begin & Anwar Sadat accept 1978 Nobel Peace Prize
1980 South Carolina Representative John W. Jenretter resigned to avoid being expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives following his conviction on charges to the FBI’s Abscam investigation.
1984 1st “planet” outside our solar system discovered
1986 The largest Mafia trial in history, with 474 defendants, opens in Palermo, Italy.
1994 Advertising executive Thomas Mosser of North Caldwell, NJ, was killed by a mail bomb that was blamed on the Unabomber.
1994 Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize. They pledged to pursue their mission of healing the Middle East.
1996 South Africa’s President Mandela signed into law a new democratic constitution, completing the country’s transition from white-minority rule to a non-racial democracy.
1999 Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested and charged with stealing classified information.
2003 The U.S. Supreme Court upheld new restrictions on political advertising in the weeks before an election. The court did strike down two provisions of the new law that involved a ban on political contibutions from those too young to vote and a limitation on some party spending. (McConnell v. FEC, 02-1674)
2004 A U.S. passenger jet landed in Vietnam, the first one to do so since the Vietnam War ended nearly three decades earlier.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
