TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – FEB 22
1349 Jews are expelled from Zurich, Switzerland.
1630 Quadequine introduced popcorn to English colonists at their first Thanksgiving dinner.
1797 The last invasion of Britain takes place when some 1,400 Frenchmen land at Fishguard in Wales.
1819 Spain signs a treaty with the United States ceding eastern Florida.
1825 Russia and Britain establish the Alaska/Canada boundary.
1855 The U.S. Congress voted to appropriate $200,000 for continuance of the work on the Washington Monument. The next morning the resolution was tabled and it would be 21 years before the Congress would vote on funds again. Work was continued by the Know-Nothing Party in charge of the project.
1862 Jefferson Davis is inaugurated president of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va. for the second time.
1879 Frank Winfield Woolworth’s ‘nothing over five cents’ shop opens at Utica, New York. It is the first chain store.
1885 The Washington Monument was officially dedicated in Washington, DC. It opened to the public in 1889.
1902 A fistfight breaks out in the Senate. Senator Benjamin Tillman suffers a bloody nose for accusing Senator John McLaurin of bias on the Philippine tariff issue.
1909 The Great White Fleet returns to Norfolk, Virginia, from an around-the-world show of naval power.
1926 Pope Pius rejects Mussolini’s offer of aid to the Vatican.
1932 Adolf Hitler is the Nazi Party candidate for the presidential elections in Germany.
1935 All plane flights over the White House are barred because they are disturbing President Roosevelt’s sleep.
1948 Czechoslovakia becomes a communist state following a coup d’etat The country became a parliamentary republic following the non-violent “Velvet Revolution” in 1989 and was split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic in 1993.
1974 An attempt was made to hijack a plane from the Baltimore-Washington International airport by Samuel Byck . If successful, he was planning on crashing the plane into the White House and killing President Richard Nixon.
1974 The ransom demanded by the kidnappers ( Symbionese Liberation Army ). of newspaper heiress, Patty Hearst of $2 million food handout to the hungry in slum areas throughout Los Angeles and San Francisco begins with many of the homeless refusing the handouts.
1980 The United States hockey team, composed in great part of college players, defeat the defending champions and favorites to win the gold medal Soviet Union squad by 4-3.
1984 Britain and the U.S. send warships to the Persian Gulf following an Iranian offensive against Iraq.
1991 The US President, George Bush, has given Iraq until 1700 GMT tomorrow to pull out of Kuwait or face a full-scale war.
1997 Scottish scientists from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh announce they have successfully cloned an adult sheep named Dolly
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
