TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 23
1349 Townspeople of Fulda, Germany massacre Jews, blaming them for the Black Death
1457 Gutenberg Bible became the first printed book.
1622 Indians attack a group of colonists in the James River area of Virginia, killing 350 residents.
1630 The first legislation prohibiting gambling is enacted in Boston.
1664 Charles II gives large tracts of land from west of the Connecticut River to the east of Delaware Bay in North America to his brother James, the Duke of York.
1719 Frederick William abolishes serfdom on crown property in Prussia.
1733 Joseph Priestly invented carbonated water (seltzer).
1765 Stamp Act passed; 1st direct British tax on American colonists, organized by Prime Minister George Grenville
1775 British statesman Edmund Burke makes a speech in the House of Commons, urging the government to adopt a policy of reconciliation with America.
1794 Congress passes laws prohibiting slave trade with foreign countries although slavery remains legal in the United States.
1820 U.S. naval hero Stephen Decatur was killed in a duel with dishonored former Chesapeake captain James Barron.
1834 Horace Greeley publishes New Yorker, a weekly literary and news magazine and forerunner of Harold Ross’ more successful The New Yorker.
1882 The U.S. Congress outlawed polygamy.
1903 Niagara Falls ran out of water due to a drought.
1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill legalizing the sale and possession of beer and wine.
1935 Persia is renamed Iran.
1935 In New York, blood tests were authorized as evidence in court cases.
1947 President Harry S. Truman issues an executive decree establishing a sweeping loyalty investigation of federal employees who needed to demonstrate complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.
1956 Martin Luther King Jr. was convicted for violating Alabama’s anti-boycott law when he organized a boycott of all city buses in Montgomery.
1968 President Lyndon Johnson names General William Westmoreland as Army Chief of Staff.
1970 In the South Carolina House of Representatives, A motion was made to fight against discrimination. This effort was made to help provide fairness to the Jews and other religious minorities.
1972 The U.S. Senate passes the Equal Rights Amendment. The amendment fails to achieve ratification.
1980 People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was founded by Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco.
1987 A barge loaded with 32,000 tons of refuse left Islip, NY, to find a place to unload. After being refused by several states and three countries space was found back in Islip.
1988 The Congress overrode U.S. President Reagan’s veto of a sweeping civil rights bill.
1989 Oliver North began two days of testimony at his Iran-Contra trial in Washington, DC.
1991 Pamela Smart is convicted for conspiring with her 16-year-old student lover, William Flynn, and three friends to kill her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry, New Hampshire.
1995 Colin Ferguson who had murdered six people and injured nineteen others on when he pulled out a gun and fired on other passengers on the Long Island Rail Road in Garden City, New York on December 7th, 1993. is sentenced to life in prison.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
