TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MAY 10
1267 Vienna’s church orders all Jews to wear a distinctive garb
1503 Christopher Columbus discovers the Cayman Islands.
1652 John Johnson, a free black, is granted 550 acres in Northampton VA
1676 Bacon’s Rebellion, frontiersmen vs Virginia Government begins
1773 To keep the troubled East India Company afloat, Parliament passes the Tea Act, taxing all tea in the American colonies.
1775 Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British.
1794 Elizabeth, the sister of King Louis XVI, is beheaded.
1801 First Barbary War: The Barbary pirates of Tripoli declare war on the United States of America (1st US foreign war)
1840 Mormon leader Joseph Smith moves his band of followers to Illinois to escape the hostilities they experienced in Missouri.
1865 Union cavalry troops capture Confederate President Jefferson Davis near Irvinville, Georgia.
1872 Victoria Woodhull becomes first the woman nominated for U.S. president.
1924 J. Edgar Hoover is appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
1933 Nazis begin burning books by “unGerman” writers such as Heinrich Mann and Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front.
1940 Winston Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as British prime minister.
1941 Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, parachutes into Scotland to broker a peace agreement
1960 US atomic sub USS Triton completes 1st circumnavigation of globe under water
1965 Warren Buffet Gains Controlling Interest In Berkshire-Hathaway
1969 US troops begin attack on Hill 937/Hamburger Hill
1989 General Manuel Noriega’s Government nullifies country’s elections, which the opposition had won by a 3-1 margin
1992 Bible Land Museum opens in Jerusalem Israel
1994 John Wayne Gacy ( The Killer Clown ) is executed in Illinois for the murders of 33 young men and boys he had raped and murdered between 1972 and his arrest in 1978.
2005 A federal bankruptcy judge approved United Airlines’ plan for cancellation of its pension plan, the largest such default in U.S. corporate history.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
