TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JULY 26
657 Battle of Siffin during the first Muslim civil war between Ali ibn Abi Talib and Muawiyah I beside Euphrates River
1526 Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon and colonists leave Santo Domingo for Florida.
1529 Francisco Pizarro receives a royal warrant to “discover and conquer” Peru.
1759 The French relinquish Fort Ticonderoga in New York to the British under General Jeffrey Amherst.
1775 The Continental Congress establishes a postal system for the colonies with Benjamin Franklin as the first postmaster general.
1788 New York became the 11th state in the United States.
1803 The Surrey Iron Railway, arguably the world’s first public railway, opens in south London
1830 King Charles X of France issues five ordinances limiting the political and civil rights of citizens.
1847 Liberia becomes the first African colony to become an independent state.
1893 Commercial production of the Addressograph started in Chicago, IL.
1908 United States Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte issues an order to immediately staff the Office of the Chief Examiner (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation)
1920 The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified.
1941 President Franklin Roosevelt seizes all Japanese assets in the United States in retaliation for the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China.
1945 Potsdam Declaration is signed Also known as the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender, the declaration signed by the US, UK and China, detailed the terms of surrender for Japan after World War II.
1947 President Harry S Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
1948 In an Executive Order, President Harry Truman calls for the end of discrimination and segregation in the U.S. armed forces.
1953 Fidel Castro leads a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, intended to spark a revolution in Cuba
1956 The Suez Crisis begins when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the British and French-owned Suez Canal hoping to charge tolls that would pay for construction of of the Aswan dam on the Nile.
1989 Robert Tappan Morris a graduate student from Cornell University was indicted on a felony charge for releasing a computer virus that disrupted thousands of computers throughout the United States in the fall of 1988.
1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 is signed into law
1996 IBM is given a contract by the Department of Energy to build the worlds most powerful custom supercomputer.
2005 The shuttle Discovery launches on mission STS-114, marking a return to space after the shuttle Columbia crash of 2003.
2006 An earlier trial verdict of the murder of 5 children by their mother (Andrea Yates) which sentenced her to life imprisonment has been overturned, and in the latest verdict she has been cleared by reason of insanity of murdering her five children by drowning them in the bath. She will now be sent to a state mental hospital until she is considered sane enough for release.
2013 The French parliament lifted a ban on insulting the president that had been in place since 1881. It had be illegal to insult the French president and those who risked it could be fined, but the government lifted the ban after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the law violated the freedom of expression.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
