TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JAN 28
1521 Emperor Charles V opens the Diet of Worms in Worms, Germany which lasts until May 25th. Produced the “Edict of Worms” which dennouced Martin Luther
1547 Henry VIII of England dies and is succeeded by his nine-year-old son Edward VI.
1757 Ahmed Shah, the first King of Afghanistan, occupies Delhi and annexes the Punjab.
1813 Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” is published by Thomas Egerton in the United Kingdom
1820 Fabian von Bellinghausen discovers the Antarctic The Baltic German explorer is believed to be the first person to sight the Earth’s southernmost continent.
1871 Surrounded by Prussian troops and suffering from famine, the French army in Paris surrenders. During the siege, balloons were used to keep contact with the outside world.
1909 The United States ended direct control over Cuba.
1915 The U.S. Coast Guard is founded to fight contraband trade and aid distressed vessels at sea.
1916 The first Jewish Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis, was appointed.
1917 US forces give up searching for Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa after nearly one year, following his massacre of 16 U.S. citizens at Santa Isabel in northern Mexico and 17 American Citizens in Columbus, New Mexico
1921 Albert Einstein startles Berlin by suggesting the possibility of measuring the universe.
1930 With the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York which is the tallest building in the world at 78 stories and dwarfs the 56 story Woolworths building and is even taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, this is at a cost of some $15,000,000 investment by Mr Chrysler
1932 The Japanese attack Shanghai, China, and declare martial law.
1933 The name “Pakistan” is coined by Choudhry Rahmat Ali and gradually accepted by Muslims in the Indian sub-continent who use it to push for a separate Muslim homeland in South Asia
1935 Iceland became the first country to introduce legalized abortion.
1936 A fellow prison inmate slashes infamous kidnapper, Richard Loeb, to death.
1955 The U.S. Congress passes a bill allowing mobilization of troops if China should attack Taiwan.
1958 The Lego brick is patented The Lego company has since produced 500 billion Lego elements, amounting to 10 lego towers from Earth to the Moon.
1958 Construction began on first private thorium-uranium nuclear reactor.
1958 Charles Starkweather, a 19-year-old high school dropout from Lincoln, Nebraska, and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, go on a deadly road trip and kill a Lincoln businessman, his wife and their maid, as part of a killing spree that began a week earlier when he killed Fugate’s stepfather and mother, and strangled Fugate’s two-and-a-half-year-old sister
1964 On this day, a U.S. jet was shot down by Soviet troops. The jet was pulling into an East German airbase at the time that it had happened.
1968 A radiation alert is issued following B-52 bomber armed with four hydrogen bombs crashes near the Arctic air base of Thule in Greenland. After the bombs were found it took nine months to remove all the contaminated material including snow from the crash site.
1970 Israeli fighter jets attack the suburbs of Cairo.
1980 Six Americans who had fled the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, on November 4, 1979, left Iran using false Canadian diplomatic passports. The Americans had been hidden at the Canadian embassy in Tehran.
1982 Italian police rescue US Brigadier General James Dozier after storming a flat in Padua where he was being held by Red Brigade guerrillas.
1986 The space shuttle Challenger explodes just after liftoff.
1997 Four police officers, appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, admit to the 1977 killing of Stephen Biko, a leader of the South African Black consciousness movement
1999 The creation of Element 114 is announced by scientists.
2003 In his second State of the Union Address, President Bush presents case for war with Iraq.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
