TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MAY 17
1630 Italian Jesuit Niccolo Zucchi sees the belts on Jupiter’s surface.
1681 Louis XIV sends an expedition to aid James II in Ireland. As a result, England declares war on France.
1756 Britain declares war on France.
1792 The New York Stock Exchange was established when a group of 24 brokers and merchants met by a tree on what is now Wall Street and signed the Buttonwood Agreement.
1875 The first Kentucky Derby is run in Louisville
1881 Frederick Douglass is appointed recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C.
1926 The U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires was damaged by bombs that were believed set by sympathizers of Sacco and Vanzetti.
1932 The U.S. Congress changed the name “Porto Rico” to “Puerto Rico.”
1936 A number of proposals are being looked at to finance ” The New Deal ” program including a flat tax on all corporate income, and also an increase in the normal income tax rate from 4% to 5%.
1946 President Harry S. Truman uses U.S. troops to seize control of US railroads, delaying a threatened strike by engineers and trainmen.
1954 The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rules for school integration in Brown v. Board of Education.
1973 The Senate Watergate Committee begins its hearings.
1974 Three car bombs are exploded in Dublin, killing 23 and injuring 100 more during rush hour. No one has ever been charged with these bombings but a number of conspiracy theories exist.
1980 Rioting erupted in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood after an all-white jury in Tampa acquitted four former Miami police officers of fatally beating black insurance executive Arthur McDuffie. Eight people were killed in the rioting.
1984 President Reagan has again been denied by the house in his continued requests for the manufacturer of Chemical Weapons, this is the third time his request has been denied by the house.
1987 In the Persian Gulf the American guided missile frigate USS Stark is struck by 2 Exocet missiles fired by an Iraqi aircraft; only one detonates, but 37 sailors are killed and 21 are wounded. Whether the launch was deliberate or a mistake is still debated.
1990 The WHO deletes homosexuality from its list of mental diseases
1996 President Bill Clinton signed a measure strengthening the ( 42 U.S.C. § 13701 passed in 1995 )law over neighborhood notification when sex offenders move in. Megan’s Law is the informal name for authorities to make information available to the public regarding registered sex offenders Megan’s Law was named for 7-year-old Megan Kanka, who was raped and killed on July 29th 1994.
2000 Thomas E. Blanton Jr. and David Luker surrendered to police in Birmingham, AL. The two former Ku Klux Klan members were arrested on charges from the bombing of a church in 1963 that killed four young black girls.
2004 In Massachusetts, same-sex couples exchanged marriage vows for the first time in the United States.
2006 The U.S. aircraft carrier Oriskany was sunk about 24 miles off Pensacola Beach. It was the first vessel sunk under a Navy program to dispose of old warships by turning them into diving attractions. It was the largest man-made reef at the time of the sinking.
2007 Trains crossed the border dividing North and South Korea for the first time since 1953.
2008 Spanish police announced that they had arrested five prominent hackers. The hackers, including two sixteen-year-olds, were implicated in hacking government websites in Asia, Latin America, and the United States, as well as over 20,000 other websites.
2011 In what police described as the biggest rescue operation to help illegal immigrants, over five hundred migrants travelling through Mexico, bound for the United States, were discovered crammed into two trucks.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
