TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 20
1413 Henry IV of England is succeed by his son Henry V.
1525 Paris’ parliament began its pursuit of Protestants.
1627 France & Spain signed an accord for fighting Protestantism.
1760 The Great Fire of Boston destroys 349 buildings.
1792 In Paris, the Legislative Assembly approves the use of the guillotine.
1800 Alessandro Volta reports his discovery of the electric battery in a letter to Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London
1815 Napoleon Bonaparte enters Paris and begins his 100-day rule.
1841 Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered the first detective story, is published.
1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published.
1868 Jesse James Gang robbed a bank in Russelville, KY, of $14,000.
1899 At Sing Sing prison, Martha M. Place became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair. She was put to death for the murder of her stepdaughter.
1916 Albert Einstein presents his general theory of relativity
1918 The Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union ask for American aid to rebuild their army.
1922 The US Postmaster General ( Hubert Work ) ordered all homes to get mailboxes or relinquish delivery of mail.
1922 The USS Langley was commissioned. It was the first aircraft carrier for the U.S. Navy.
1933 Dachau the first Nazi concentration camp, is completed
1952 The U.S. Senate ratified a peace treaty with Japan
1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson orders 4,000 troops to protect the Selma-Montgomery civil rights marchers.
1969 Senator Edward Kennedy calls on the United States to close all bases in Taiwan.
1980 The U.S. made an appeal to the International Court concerning the American Hostages in Iran.
1982 U.S. scientists return from Antarctica with the first land mammal fossils found there.
1984 The U.S. Senate rejected an amendment to permit spoken prayer in public schools.
1987 The United State approves AZT, a drug that is proven to slow the progress of AIDS.
1991 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that employers could not exclude women from jobs where exposure to toxic chemicals could potentially damage a fetus.
1993 Two terrorist bombs are exploded close to the heart of Warrington Golden Square shopping mall. 3-year-old Johnathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry are killed and another 56 people injured in the blasts which the IRA has admitted carrying out.
1993 Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared emergency rule. He set a referendum on whether the people trusted him or the hard-line Congress to govern.
1995 Five two man terrorist teams from the Aum Shinrikyo religious (doomsday cult), riding on separate subway trains, converge at the Kasumigaseki station and secretly release lethal sarin gas into the air causing the death of Twelve people, and a further 5,500 treated in hospitals.
2000 Former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, once known as H. Rap Brown, was captured following a shootout that left a sherriff’s deputy dead
2002 The FBI arrested a group of approximately 90 people involved in making and/or viewing explicit materials that included the use of children. Among those detained for this reason were clergy members, Little League coaches, along with at least one school bus driver and police officer.
2002 Arthur Andersen pled innocent to charges that it had shredded documents and deleted computer files related to the energy company Enron.
2004 Following the release of photographs published in worldwide news media of inmate Satar Jabar standing on a box with wires connected to his body and Lynndie England and Charles Graner posing with prisoners ordered to form human pyramid.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
