TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: MAY 27
1529 30 Jews of Posing Hungary, charged with blood ritual, burned at stake
1647 Achsah Young becomes the first woman known to be executed as a witch in Massachusetts.
1668 Three colonists are expelled from Massachusetts for being Baptists.
1679 Habeaus Corpus Act (strengthening person’s right to challenge unlawful arrest & imprisonment) passes in England
1703 Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) founded by Russian Tsar Peter the Great
1813 Americans capture Fort George, Canada.
1907 The Bubonic Plague breaks out in San Francisco.
1930 Richard Drew invents masking tape
1935 The Supreme Court declares President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act unconstitutional.
1936 The Queen Mary left England on its maiden voyage, arriving in France four hours later.
1937 The Golden Gate Bridge is opened
1941 The German battleship Bismarck is sunk by British naval and air forces.
1942 Czech resistance fighters kill Reinhard Heydrich
The high-ranking German Nazi official was one of the main architects of the Holocaust. In retaliation, the Nazis murdered all male inhabitants over 15 years of age in the Czech village of Lidice and deported most of the remaining people to concentration camps.
1944 American General Douglas MacArthur lands on Biak Island in New Guinea.
1968 After 48 years as coach of the Chicago Bears, George Halas retired.
1969 Construction of Walt Disney World began in Florida.
1972 President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev sign an arms reduction agreement.
1977 The Sex Pistols release “God Save the Queen”, sparking major controversy and leading to a ban on the song by the BBC
1985 In Beijing, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997.
1986 President Reagan orderes 2 Poseidon-class submarines be dismantled
1987 Jim & Tammy Bakker appear on “Nightline” after PTL scandal
1996 After a year and a half of bloodshed, Russian President Boris Yeltsin met with the leader of the Chechen rebels and negotiated a cease-fire.
1997 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones could continue while President Clinton was in office.
1998 Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison for not warning anyone about the plot to bomb an Oklahoma City federal building.
1999 The international war crimes tribunal indicts Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for war atrocities.
2006 Earthquake strikes Java, Indonesia at 5:53:58 AM local time (22:53:58 UTC May 26) devastating Bantul and the city of Yogyakarta, killing over 6,600 people
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
