TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – FEB 21
1173 Pope Alexander III canonizes Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury
1431 England begins trial against Joan of Arc
1595 The Jesuit poet Robert Southwell is hanged for “treason,” being a Catholic.
1775 As troubles with Great Britain increase, colonists in Massachusetts vote to buy military equipment for 15,000 men.
1828 The first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix is printed, both in English and in the newly invented Cherokee alphabet.
1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish “The Communist Manifesto”
1878 The world’s first telephone book is issued by the New Haven Connecticut Telephone Company containing the names of its 50 subscribers.
1885 The Washington Monument is dedicated in Washington, D.C.
1887 Oregon becomes 1st US state to make Labor Day a holiday
1916 World War I: Battle of Verdun begins, leads to an estimated 1 million casualties
1956 A grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama indicts 115 in a Negro bus boycott.
1958 The peace symbol is designed by Gerald Holtom
The symbol was commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and combines the semaphore symbols for the letters N and D – an abbreviation of “Nuclear Disarmament”.
1965 El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcom X) is assassinated in front of 400 people.
1972 Richard Nixon arrives in Beijing, China, becoming the first U.S. president to visit a country not diplomatically recognized by the U.S.
1981 “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe, murderer of 13 women, captured
1986 AIDS patient Ryan White returns to classes at Western Middle School
1988 During a live TV broadcast, televangelist Jimmy Swaggart (age 52) admitted to visiting a prostitute, then announced he would be leaving his ministry for an unspecified length of time. (Defrocked in April by the Assemblies of God, he was ordered to stay off TV for a year, but returned after only three months)
2002 It was confirmed that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was dead, allegedly murdered by Islamic militants.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
