TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 14
1489 Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, sold her kingdom to Venice. She was the last of the Lusignan dynasty.
1590 Battle of Ivry: French King Henry IV beats Catholic League during French Wars of Religion
1629 A Royal charter is granted to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1743 First American town meeting is held at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.
1757 British Admiral John Byng is executed by a firing squad on board HMS Monarch for neglect of duty.
1900 United States currency goes on the gold standard.
1912 An anarchist named Antonio Dalba unsuccessfully attempts to kill Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III in Rome.
1914 Henry Ford announced the new continuous motion method to assemble cars. The process decreased the time to make a car from 12½ hours to 93 minutes.
1923 President Warren G. Harding becomes the first U.S. President to file an income tax report.
1936 Adolf Hitler tells a crowd of 300,000 that Germany’s only judge is God and itself.
1939 The Nazis dissolve the republic of Czechoslovakia.
1942 For the first time in history, a dying patient’s life is saved by penicillin
1947 The United States signs a 99-year lease on naval bases in the Philippines.
1958 The U.S. government suspended arms shipments to the Batista government of Cuba.
1967 John F. Kennedy’s body is moved from a temporary grave to a permanent one in Arlington Cemetery.
1978 An Israeli force of 22,000 invades south Lebanon, hitting the PLO bases.
1980 A Polish airliner crashed while making an emergency landing near Warsaw. 87 people were killed. A 14-man U.S. boxing team was aboard the plane.
1983 OPEC agreed to cut its oil prices by 15% for the first time in its 23-year history.
1989 Imported assault guns were banned in the U.S. under President George H.W. Bush.
1991 The “Birmingham Six,” imprisoned for 16 years for their alleged part in an IRA pub bombing, are set free after a court agrees that the police fabricated evidence.
1996 U.S. President Bill Clinton committed $100 million for an anti-terrorism pact with Israel to track down and root out Islamic militants.
2002 A Scottish appeals court upheld the conviction of a Libyan intelligence agent for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. A five-judge court ruled unanimously that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was guilty of bringing down the plane over Lockerbie, Scotland.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
