TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 10
0019 Germanicus, the best loved of Roman princes, dies of poisoning. On his deathbed he accuses Piso, the governor of Syria, of poisoning him.
0732 At Tours, France, Charles Martel kills Abd el-Rahman and halts the Muslim invasion of Europe.
1780 Great Hurricane of 1780 kills 20,000 to 30,000 in the Caribbean, hitting Barbados first. Atlantic’s deadliest recorded hurricane.
1802 1st non indian settlement in Oklahoma
1845 The U.S. Naval Academy is founded at Annapolis, Md.
1846 Neptune’s moon Triton discovered by William Lassell
1886 The tuxedo dinner jacket made its debut at a ball in Tuxedo Park, N.Y.
1911 The Xinhai Revolution… Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionaries overthrew the Manchu Qing Dynasty in China.
1913 The Panama Canal officially joined the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific ocean when the Gamboa dike was demolished with charges of dynamite.
1933 At Rio de Janeiro, nations of the Western Hemisphere sign a non-aggression and conciliation treaty. President Roosevelt adopts a “good neighbor” policy toward Latin America and announces a policy of nonintervention in Latin American affairs at the December 7th International American Conference at Montevideo, Uruguay.
1953 The Mutual Defense Treaty between the US and South Korea signed.
1957 A fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in Cumbria, England becomes the world’s first major nuclear accident
1970 The Quebec Provincial Minister of Labour, Pierre Laporte, is kidnapped by terrorists.
1971 The London Bridge, built in 1831 and dismantled in 1967, reopens in Lake Havusu City, Arizona, after being sold to Robert P. McCulloch and moved to the United States.
1973 Spiro Agnew resigns the vice presidency amid accusations of income tax evasion. President Richard Nixon names Gerald Ford as the new vice president. Agnew is later convicted and sentenced to three years probation and fined $10,000.
1982 Pope John Paul II canonizes Rev M Kolbe, who volunteered to die in place of another inmate at Auschwitz concentration camp, a saint
1985 An Egyptian plane carrying hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship is intercepted by US Navy F-14s and forced to land at a NATO base in Sicily.
1991 Former U.S. postal worker Joseph Harris kills two former co-workers at the post office in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The night before, Harris had killed his former supervisor, Carol Ott, with a three-foot samurai sword, and shot her fiance, Cornelius Kasten, in their home. His murders were one of many committed by postal workers which resulted in the phrase “going postal.”
2002 The US Congress gave President Bush authorization to use military force against Iraq.
2008 Orakzai bombing, Afghanistan: members of the Taliban drive an explosive-laden truck into a meeting of 600 people discussing ways to rid their area of the Taliban; the bomb kills 110
2011 Megavirus chilensis, the largest virus yet to be discovered, was found off the coast of Chile. The newly found virus is ten to twenty times wider than an average virus and is thought to infect small organisms in the sea like amoebas.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
