TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – FEB 4
211 Roman Emperor Septimius Severus dies, leaving the Roman Empire in the hands of his two quarrelsome sons, Caracalla and Geta
1194 Richard I, King of England, is freed from captivity in Germany.
1787 Shay’s Rebellion, an uprising of debt-ridden Massachusetts farmers against the new U.S. government, fails.
1795 France abolishes slavery in her territories and confers slaves to citizens.
1824 J W Goodrich introduces rubber galoshes to public
1859 One of the oldest known copies of the Bible, “The Codex Sinaiticus” (Sinai Bible), is seen in Egypt by Constantin von Tischendorf who takes the manuscript home with him
1861 Confederate constitutional convention meets for 1st time, Montgomery AL, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi & South Carolina elect Jefferson Davis President of Confederacy
1889 Harry Longabaugh is released from Sundance Prison in Wyoming, thereby acquiring the famous nickname, “the Sundance Kid.”
1899 After an exchange of gunfire, fighting breaks out between American troops and Filipinos near Manila, sparking the Philippine-American War
1909 California law segregates Caucasian and Japanese schoolchildren.
1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg limits freedom of the press
1936 1st radioactive substance produced synthetically (radium E)
1941 The United Service Organization (U.S.O.) is formed to cater to armed forces and defense industries.
1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin meet at Yalta in the Crimea to discuss the final phase of World War II
1957 Smith-Corona Manufacturing Inc., of New York, began selling portable electric typewriters. The first machine weighed 19 pounds.
1972 Senator Strom Thurmond suggests John Lennon be deported
1974 Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, beginning one of the most bizarre cases in FBI history.
1985 U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s defense budget called for a tripling of the expenditure on the “Star Wars” research program.
1985 20 countries (but not US) sign UN treaty outlawing torture
1988 Panamanian General Manuel Noriega indicted by US federal grand jury for drug trafficking and racketeering
1994 20 die in armed assault on mosque in Khartoum, Sudan
1999 Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was shot and killed in front of his Bronx home by four plainclothes New York City police officers. The officers had been conducting a nighttime search for a rape suspect.
2000 German extortionist Klaus-Peter Sabotta is jailed for life for attempted murder and extortion in connection with the sabotage of German railway lines.
2003 The country of Yugoslavia disappeared, to be replaced by the loose federation of Serbia and Montenegro.
2004 Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room
2014 Same-sex marriage is legalized in Scotland
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
