TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – FEB 19
1408 The revolt of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, against King Henry IV, ends with his defeat and death at Bramham Moor.
1674 The Netherlands and England signed the Peace of Westminster, by which New Amsterdam passed to the English (and was renamed New York).
1807 Vice President Aaron Burr is arrested in Alabama for treason. He is later found innocent.
1846 The formal transfer of government between Texas and the United States took place. Texas had officially become a state on December 29, 1845.
1847 Rescuers finally reach the ill-fated Donner Party in the Sierras.
1861 Russian Tsar Alexander II abolishes serfdom.
1878 Thomas Edison patents the phonograph It was the first machine able to reproduce recorded sound.
1881 Kansas became the first state to prohibit all alcoholic beverages.
1903 The Austria-Hungary government decrees a mandatory two year military service.
1917 American troops are recalled from the Mexican border.
1925 President Calvin Coolidge proposes the phasing out of inheritance tax.
1933 A major debate is raging on both sides of the Atlantic concerning the money loaned to Great Britain for the War effort . At the end of the War the French Government stated they would only pay 10 cents on the dollar of the money loaned to them and for weapons and the United States Government Agreed to the settlement. Britain in the meantime came to the United States and agreed to pay the full debt including a higher rate of interest than the French.
1942 President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order that resulted in the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast.
1942 The New York Yankees announced that they would admit 5,000 uniformed servicemen free to each of their home ball games during the coming season.
1953 The State of Georgia approved the first literature censorship board in the U.S. Newspapers were excluded from the new legislation.
1954 The Ford T-Bird appears as a prototype but did not selling until late in 1954 costing $2,900
1963 The Soviet Union informed U.S. President Kennedy it would withdraw “several thousand” of its troops in Cuba.
1965 Fourteen Vietnam War protesters are arrested for blocking the United Nations’ doors in New York.
1966 Robert F. Kennedy suggests the United States offer the Vietcong a role in governing South Vietnam.
1981 The U.S. State Department calls El Salvador a “textbook case” of a Communist plot.
1986 The U.S. Senate approved a treaty outlawing genocide. The pact had been submitted 37 years earlier for ratification.
2004 Former Enron Corp. chief executive Jeffrey Skilling is charged with fraud, insider trading and other crimes in connection with the energy trader’s collapse.
He was convicted in 2006 of multiple federal felony charges relating to Enron’s financial collapse
2005 The USS Jimmy Carter was commissioned at Groton, CT. It was the last of the Seawolf class of attack submarines.
2008 Fidel Castro steps down as Cuba’s president he was 81 years old at the time and had been in power for 49 years
2012 A team at Maastricht University led by Professor Mark Post have successfully grown muscle tissue in the lab from stem cells. The step is the first towards their goal of creating a lab-grown hamburger by the fall.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
