TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – FEB 13
167 Polycarp, a disciple of St. John and Bishop of Smyrna, is martyred on the west coast of Asia Minor.
1258 Baghdad falls to the Mongols as the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed
1542 Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, is beheaded for adultery.
1689 British Parliament adopts the Bill of Rights.
1692 In the Glen Coe highlands of Scotland, thirty-eight members of the MacDonald clan are murdered by soldiers of the neighboring Campbell clan for not pledging allegiance to William of Orange. Ironically the pledge had been made but not communicated to the clans. The event is remembered as the Massacre of Glencoe.
1865 The Confederacy approves the recruitment of slaves as soldiers, as long as the approval of their owners is gained.
1866 Jesse James holds up his first bank.
1889 Norman Coleman became the first U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
1900 The Anglo-German accord of 1899 was ratified by Reichstag, in which Britain renounced rights in Samoa in favor of Germany and the U.S.
1920 The League of Nations recognized the continued neutrality of Switzerland.
1935 Bruno Hauptmann was found guilty of murder in the Lindbergh kidnapping case
1936 First social security checks are put in the mail.
1949 A mob burns a radio station in Ecuador after the broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.”
1953 The Pope asks the United States to grant clemency to convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
1955 Israel has bought four Dead Sea scrolls written at various times between the middle of the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD. from the Syrians for $250,000.
1970 General Motors is reportedly redesigning automobiles to run on unleaded fuel.
1984 Konstantin Chernenko is selected to succeed Yuri Andropov as Party General Secretary in the Soviet Union.
1991 Two “smart bombs” kill at least 408 civilians in Baghdad The Amiriyah shelter bombing was one of the worst cases of civilian killings during “Operation Desert Storm”.
1999 A bomb exploded just outside a government-owned bank in southern Kosovo. Nine people were killed.
2000 The last “Peanuts” comic strip is published
2002 In Alexandria, VA, John Walker Lindh pled innocent to a 10-count federal indictment. He was charged with conspiring to kill Americans and aiding Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.
2009 The House of Representatives has voted 246 to 183 to jolt the nation’s struggling economy with a $787.2 billion stimulus package, designed to provide quick tax relief and create or save some 3.5 million jobs.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
