TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MAY 16
1770 Marie Antoinette marries future King Louis XVI of France.
1866 – The U.S. Congress authorized the first 5-cent piece to be minted.
1868 President Andrew Johnson is acquitted during Senate impeachment, by one vote, cast by Edmund G. Ross.
1879 The Treaty of Gandamak between Russia and England sets up the Afghan state.
1918 The Sedition Act is passed by the U.S. Congress, creating more harsh penalties aimed at people who were against American participation in World War I. The law punished dissenters including anyone who was found to be insulting the government. The Sedition Act is considered by many law scholars to be in direct conflict with the First Amendment right to free speech.
1920 Joan of Arc is canonized in Rome.
1944 1st of 180,000+ Hungarian Jews reach Auschwitz
1960 Theodore Maiman fires the first functional laser The American physicist’s invention, an advancement of earlier research by scientists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was patented in 1967
1960 A Big Four Summit – The leaders of the most powerful nations on earth came to verbal blows in Paris over the U2 Spy Plane which flew over the Soviet Union. President Nikita Khrushchev and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower are at odds over the issue.
1963 After 22 Earth orbits, Gordon Cooper returns to Earth, ending the last mission of Project Mercury.
1965 Spaghetti-O’s were sold for the first time.
1969 Rioting and protests against the war in Vietnam continue on campuses throughout California with local National Guardsman patrolling Berkeley campus of the University of California area with fixed bayonets to keep peace and order.
1974 Israeli planes bomb 7 Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon killing at least 27 people and leaving 138 injured.
1987 The Bobro 400 set sail from New York Harbor with 3,200 tons of garbage. The barge travelled 6,000 miles in search of a place to dump its load. It returned to New York Harbor after 8 weeks with the same load.
1988 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police do not have to have a search warrant to search discarded garbage.
1988 The Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has declared that Nicotine is a as addictive as Heroin and Cocaine and that all cigarette packets should carry a public health warning , we have included a graphic with his suggestions.
1991 Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to address the United States Congress.
1997 President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire ended 32 years of autocratic rule when rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila expelled him from the country.
2000 U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was nominated to run for U.S. Senator in New York. She was the first U.S. first lady to run for public office.
2005 Army Specialist Sabrina Harman was convicted at Fort Hood, Texas, for her role in the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and sentenced to 6 months in prison. (She was the woman featured in many of the worst photographs of abuses of prisoners on TV and Newspapers)
2013 Human stem cells are successfully cloned
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
