TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JULY 11
1244 Khwarezmian Tatars sack Jerusalem, decimating the city’s Christian population and driving out Jews
1302 An army of French knights, led by the Count of Artois, is routed by Flemish pikemen.
1346 Charles IV of Luxembourg is elected Holy Roman Emperor in Germany.
1533 Henry VIII is excommunicated from the Catholic Church by Pope Clement VII.
1786 Morocco agrees to stop attacking American ships in the Mediterranean for a payment of $10,000.
1804 Alexander Hamilton is mortally wounded by Aaron Burr in a duel.
1864 In the U.S., Confederate forces led by Gen. Jubal Early began an invasion of Washington, DC. They turned back the next day.
1918 Enrico Caruso recorded “Over There” written by George M. Coha
1934 U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first American chief executive to travel through the Panama Canal while in office.
1962 The first transatlantic TV transmission was sent through the Telstar I satellite.
1972 American forces break the 95-day siege at An Loc in Vietnam.
1975 Archaeologists unearth an army of 8,000 life-size clay figures created more than 2,000 years ago for the Emperor Qin Shi Huang.
1977 The Medal of Freedom was awarded posthumously to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in a White House ceremony and presented by President Jimmy Carter.
1985 Dr. H. Harlan Stone announced that he had used zippers for stitches on 28 patients. The zippers were used when he thought he may have to re-operate.
1995 Full diplomatic relations are established between the United States and Vietnam.
1995 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men are massacred when Bosnian Serbs overrun the UN ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica
1999 A U.S. Air Force jet flew over the Antarctic and dropped off emergency medical supplies for Dr. Jerri Nelson after she had discovered a lump in her breast. Nelso was at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Center.
2006 Over 200 people were killed and about 700 people were injured in a series of bombings on Mumbai city trains.
2011 The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, closes after several allegations that the paper’s journalists hacked into voicemail accounts belonging to not only a 13-year-old murder victim, but also the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
