TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 1
331BC Alexander the Great decisively shatters King Darius III’s Persian army at Gaugamela (Arbela), in a tactical masterstroke that leaves him master of the Persian Empire.
1569 The Duke of Norfolk was imprisoned by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth for trying to marry Mary the Queen of Scots.
1588 The feeble Sultan Mohammed Shah of Persia, hands over power to his 17-year old son Abbas.
1800 Spain ceded Louisiana to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso.
1814 Opening of the Congress of Vienna, which redrew Europe’s political map after the defeat of Napoléon Bonaparte
1839 The British government decides to send a punitive naval expedition to China.
1847 Maria Mitchell, American astronomer, discovers a comet and is elected the same day to the American Academy of Arts—the first woman to be so honored. The King of Denmark awarded her a gold medal for her discovery.
1856 The first installment of Gustav Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary appears in the Revue de Paris after the publisher refuses to print a passage in which the character Emma has a tryst in the back seat of a carriage.
1867 Karl Marx’ “Das Kapital” published
1890 The U.S. Congress passed the McKinley Tariff Act. The act raised tariffs to a record level.
1908 The Ford Model T, the first car for millions of Americans, hits the market. Over 15 million Model Ts are eventually sold, all of them black.
1940 The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened as the first toll superhighway in the United States.
1946 Eleven Nazi war criminals are sentenced to be hanged at Nuremberg trials—Hermann Goring, Alfred Jodl, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachin von Ribbentrop, Fritz Saukel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Julius Streicher, and Alfred Rosenberg.
1958 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) replaces the 43-year-old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in the US.
1960 Nigeria becomes independent from the UK.
1961 The Federal Republic of Cameroon is formed by the merger of East and West Cameroon.
1962 The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson debuts; Carson will remain The Tonight Show host until 1992.
1964 The first Free Speech Movement protest erupts spontaneously on the University of California, Berkeley campus; students demanded an end to the ban of on-campus political activities.
1971 First CT or CAT brain scan performed, at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London.
1974 Five Nixon aides–Kenneth Parkinson, Robert Mardian, Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell–go on trial for conspiring to hinder the Watergate investigation.
1982 First compact disc player, released by Sony.
1984 U.S. Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan announced that he was taking a leave of absence following his indictment on charges of larceny and fraud. He was later acquitted.
1989 Denmark introduces the world’s first “civil union” law granting same-sex couples certain legal rights and responsibilities but stopping short of recognizing same-sex marriages.
1991 U.S. President Bush condemned the military coup in Haiti that removed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power. U.S. economic and military aid was suspended.
1992 The Strategic Arm Reduction Treaty was approved by the U.S. Senate.
1994 The U.S. and Japan avoided a trade war by reaching a series of trade agreements.
1995 Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine other defendants were convicted in New York of conspiring to attack the U.S. through bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.
2001 San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban Internet filters designed to keep pornography away from children at city libraries. The board left the decision up to the Library Commission to decide whether to install filtering software in children’s areas. A federal law in the U.S. mandated the use of the filters.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
