TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 9
1454 Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy. Matthias Ringmann, a German mapmaker, named the American continent in his honor.
1522 Martin Luther begins preaching his “Invocavit Sermons” in the German city of Wittenberg, reminding citizens to trust God’s word rather than violence and thus helping bring to a close the revolutionary stage of the Reformation
1734 The Russians take Danzig (Gdansk) in Poland.
1788 Connecticut becomes the 5th state.
1796 Napoleon Bonaparte marries Josephine de Beauharnais in Paris, France.
1799 The U.S. Congress contracted with Simeon North, of Berlin, CT, for 500 horse pistols at the price of $6.50 each.
1820 Congress passes the Land Act, paving the way for westward expansion.
1822 Charles M. Graham received the first patent for artificial teeth.
1841 The rebel slaves who seized a Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, in 1839 are freed by the Supreme Court despite Spanish demands for extradition.
1862 The first and last battle between the ironclads U.S.S. Monitor and C.S.S. Virginia ends in a draw.
1916 Mexican bandit Pancho Villa leads 1,500 horsemen on a raid of Columbus, N.M. killing 17 U.S. soldiers and citizens.
1918 Russian Bolshevik Party becomes the Communist Party
1933 US Congress is called into special session by FDR, beginning its “100 days”
1933 President Franklin Roosevelt submits the Emergency Banking Act to Congress to ease the run on small banks causing them to go into bankruptcy.
1936 The German press warns that all Jews who vote in the upcoming elections will be arrested.
1956 British authorities arrest and deport Archbishop Makarios from Cyprus. He is accused of supporting terrorists.
1959 The Barbie doll is unveiled at a toy fair in New York City.
1964 The first Ford Mustang rolls off the Ford assembly line.
1968 General William Westmoreland asks for 206,000 more troops in Vietnam.
1974 Work on the 800 mile long Alaska Oil pipeline connecting oil fields in northern Alaska to the sea port at Valdez. It is completed in just over two years in 1977 and transports up to 2 million barrels of oil per day.
1975 Iraq launches an offensive against the rebellious Kurds.
1977 About a dozen armed Hanafi Muslims invaded three buildings in Washington, DC. They killed one person and took more than 130 hostages. The siege ended two days later.
1983 The official Soviet news agency TASS says that U.S. President Reagan is full of “bellicose lunatic anti-communism.”
1986 Navy divers find the crew compartment of the space shuttle Challenger along with the remains of the astronauts.
1987 Chrysler Corporation offered to buy American Motors Corporation.
1989 In the U.S., President George H.W. Bush urged for a mandatory death penalty in drug-related killings.
1997 A rapper known as Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) was shot to death in a drive by shooting while sitting at a stoplight in Los Angeles. This murder was thought to be brought upon by a rift between rival rappers from both the East and West Coast.
2004 John Allen Muhammad was sentenced to death in Virginia for the murder of Dean Harold Meyers in Prince William County, Virginia as part of the so called 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, killing 10 people over 8 states Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas and Virginia.
2010 A Pennsylvania woman has been charged with terror offences that include using the Internet to recruit militants for overseas attacks. Colleen LaRose, who is also known as Fatima LaRose and ‘Jihad Jane,’ was arrested in Philadelphia in October, 2009.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
