TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – FEB 16
1760 Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George are killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements.
1804 US Navy lieutenant Steven Decatur leads a small group of sailors into Tripoli harbor and burns the USS Philadelphia, captured earlier by Barbary pirates.
1857 The National Deaf Mute College was incorporated in Washington, DC. It was the first school in the world for advanced education of the deaf. The school was later renamed Gallaudet College.
1923 The tomb of King Tutankhamen, discovered in 1922, was opened.
1934 Thousands of Socialists battle Communists at a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
1937 Dupont patents a new thread, nylon, which will replace silk in a number of products and reduce costs.
1946 The first commercially designed helicopter was tested in Connecticut.
1950 Truman had announced what he called a “non-political” campaign, which was intended to help democrats run for seats in Congress.
1951 Stalin contends the U.N. is becoming the weapon of aggressive war.
1952 The FBI arrests 10 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.
1959 Fidel Castro takes the oath as Cuban premier in Havana.
1965 Four persons are held in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument.
1968 The country’s first 911 phone system went into service in Haleyville, Ala.
1978 China and Japan sign a $20 billion trade pact, which is the most important move since the 1972 resumption of diplomatic ties.
1985 Hezbollah is founded The Lebanese political party and militant group is classified as a terrorist organization by several western countries.
1987 The first trial against John Demjanjuk begins in Jerusalem Demjanjuk was falsely accused of being a particularly brutal Nazi guard dubbed “Ivan the Terrible”; in a separate trial in 2011, he was convicted by a German criminal court as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people..
1999 A bomb exploded at the government headquarters in Uzbekistan. Gunfire followed the incident. The event apparently was an attempt on the life of President Islam Karimov.
2001 Ethnic Albanian extremists carry out a bomb attack on a bus convoy carrying more than 250 Serbs to a religious ceremony in Kosovo.
2002 The operator of a crematory in Noble, GA, was arrested after dozens of corpses were found stacked in storage sheds and scattered around in the surrounding woods.
2006 U.N. human rights investigators have called for the closure of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
