TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JAN 4
1757 Robert Francois Damiens makes an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate King Louis XV of France.
1847 Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the United States government
1863 Union General Henry Halleck, by direction of President Abraham Lincoln, orders General Ulysses Grant to revoke his infamous General Order No. 11 that expelled Jews from his operational area.
1885 Dr. William W. Grant of Davenport, Iowa, performed what is thought to be the first appendectomy.
1896 Utah becomes the 45th state of the Union.
1902 France offers to sell their Nicaraguan Canal rights to the United States.
1904 The U.S. Supreme Court decides in the Gonzales v. Williams case that Puerto Ricans are not aliens and can enter the United States freely, yet stops short of awarding citizenship.
1920 The Negro National League, the first black baseball league, is organized by Rube Foster.
1923 A surprise attack by members of the Ku Klux Klan on a black residential area of Rosewood, Fla left 8 people dead.
1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt claims in his State of the Union message that the federal government will provide jobs for 3.5 million Americans on welfare.
1936 Billboard magazine publishes its first music Hit Parade.
1948 The Arabs and Jews battled for control of the Wailing Wall. This is considered to be one of the holiest shrines in the entire city.
1951 UN forces abandon Seoul, Korea, to the Chinese Communist Army.
1954 Elvis Presley recorded a 10 minute demo at Sun Records Memphis Recording Service in Nashville
1955 Television celebrity Jackie Gleason signed a $5,000,000 contract with the CBS television station.
1958 Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from orbit
1964 The last victim of THE BOSTON STRANGLER Mary Sullivan is raped and strangled to death in her Boston apartment. The Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo terrorized the city between 1962 and 1964, raping and killing 13 women.
1965 President Johnson outlined his “Great Society” in his State of the Union address.
1966 Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the position of Republican Governor of California.
1974 President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over tape recordings and documents that had been subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
1976 The Ulster Volunteer Force kills six Irish Catholic civilians in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The next day 10 Protestant civilians are murdered in retaliation.
1979 Ohio officials approve an out-of-court settlement awarding $675,000 to the victims and families in the 1970 shootings at Kent State University, in which four students were killed and nine wounded by National Guard troops.
1990 Over 300 people die and more than 700 are injured in Pakistan’s deadliest train accident, when an overloaded passenger train collides with an empty freight train.
1991 The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to condemn Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
1998 North American ice storm of 1998 begins in Canada with steady freezing rain falling over an area of several thousand square miles of Eastern Ontario, including Ottawa and southern Quebec, northern New York, and northern New England (including parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine).
1999 Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a former professional wrestler, is sworn in as populist governor of Minnesota.
2006 A suicide bomb attack at a Shia funeral in Northern Baghdad kills at least 32 people and injured dozens of others.
2007 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) becomes the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
