TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 26
1799 Napoleon Bonaparte captures Jaffa, Palestine.
1804 Congress orders the removal of Indians east of the Mississippi River to Louisiana.
1804 The territory of New Orleans is organized in the Louisiana Purchase.
1832 Famed western artist George Catlin begins his voyage up the Missouri River aboard the American Fur Company steamship Yellowstone.
1885 Eastman Film Co. manufactures the first commercial motion picture film.
1910 The U.S. Congress passed an amendment to the 1907 Immigration Act that barred criminals, paupers, anarchists and carriers of disease from settling in the U.S.
1938 Hermann Goering warns all Jews to leave Austria.
1942 The Germans begin sending Jews to Auschwitz in Poland.
1945 The battle of Iwo Jima ended; about 22,000 Japanese troops were killed or captured in the fighting and more than 4,500 U.S. troops were killed.
1945 In the Aleutians, the battle of Komandorski began when the Japanese attempted to reinforce a garrison at Kiska and were intercepted by a U.S. naval force.
1950 Senator Joe McCarthy names Owen Lattimore, an ex-State Department adviser, as a Soviet spy.
1951 The United States Air Force flag design is approved.
1953 Dr. Jonas Salk announces a new vaccine against polio.
1954 The United States sets off an H-bomb blast in the Marshall Islands, the second in four weeks.
1969 Writer John Kennedy Toole commits suicide at the age of 32. His mother helps get his first and only novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, published. It goes on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.
1971 East Pakistan proclaimed its independence, taking the name Bangladesh.
1979 The Camp David treaty is signed between Israel and Egypt.
1982 Ground is broken in Washington D.C. for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
1989 The first free elections take place in the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin is elected.
1995 Seven of the 15 European Union states abolished border controls.
1997 The bodies of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were found dead in a California mansion all having committed suicide by ingesting a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka.
1998 Unisys Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp. pay a $3.15 million fine for selling spare parts at inflated prices to the U.S. federal government.
1999 In Michigan, Dr. Jack Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder for giving a terminally ill man a lethal injection and putting it all on videotape on September 17, 1998 for “60 Minutes.”
2000 Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia for the first time he went on to be re-elected in 2004 and is the current President of the Russian Federation.
2000 Pope John Paul II who is currently on visiting Israel as part of his Millennium Pilgrimage, prayed for forgiveness of the sins of those involved in the Holocaust.
2008 Starbucks are shutting all of its branches for three-and-a-half hours of staff training on the evening This Day 2008. This has distrupted the daily routines of millions of Americans, who will have to move to rival coffee shops.
2010 Barack Obama and the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have agreed a new nuclear arms reduction treaty. The treaty will limit both sides to 1,550 warheads, which is about 30% less than currently are allowed.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
