TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – NOV 17
1558 Queen Elizabeth ascends to the throne of England.
1558 The Church of England is re-established.
1603 Sir Walter Raleigh went on trial for treason.
1796 Catherine the Great of Russia died at the age of 67.
1796 Napoleon Bonaparte defeats an Italian army near the Alpone River, Italy.
1798 Irish nationalist leader Wolfe Tone committed suicide while in jail awaiting execution
1800 The Sixth Congress (2nd session) convenes for the first time in Washington, D.C.
1842 A grim abolitionist meeting is held in Marlboro Chapel, Boston, after the imprisonment of a mulatto named George Latimer, one of the first fugitive slaves to be apprehended in Massachusetts.
1855 David Livingstone becomes the first European to see Victoria Falls, in what is now Zambia and Zimbabwe
1869 The Suez Canal is formally opened.
1903 Vladimir Lenin’s efforts to impose his own radical views on the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party splits the party into two factions, the Bolsheviks, who support Lenin, and the Mensheviks.
1913 In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm banned the armed forces from dancing the tango.
1918 Influenza deaths reported in the United States have far exceeded World War I casualties.
1922 Siberia voted for union with the U.S.S.R.
1951 Britain reports development of the world’s first nuclear-powered heating system.
1968 Night of the “Heidi bowl:” NBC switched from football to movie of Heidi. In the missing 42 seconds, the lagging Raiders scored two touchdowns, defeating the Jets.
1970 Douglas Engelbart receives the patent for the first computer mouse
1973 President Nixon said “I am not a crook.”
1979 Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 female and black American hostages being held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
1980 WHHM Television in Washington, D.C., becomes the first African-American public-broadcasting television station.
1989 Velvet Revolution begins. A week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a demonstration of by students commemorating International Students Day in Prague was violently shut down by riot police.
1990 A mass grave was discovered by the bridge over the River Kwai in Thailand. The bodies were believed to be those of World War II prisoners of war.
1993 US House of Representatives passes resolution to establish the North American Free Trade Agreement.
2003 Arnold Schwarzenegger sworn in as Californian Governor
2010 Reasearchers trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms. It was the first time humans had trapped antimatter.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
