TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 16
1555 The Protestant martyrs Bishop Hugh Latimer and Bishop Nicholas Ridley are burned at the stake for heresy in England.
1701 Yale University is founded as The Collegiate School of Kilingworth, Connecticut by Congregationalists who consider Harvard too liberal.
1793 Queen Marie Antoinette is beheaded by guillotine during the French Revolution.
1859 Abolitionist John Brown, with 21 men, seizes the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Va. U.S. Marines capture the raiders, killing several. John Brown is later hanged in Virginia for treason.
1900 Great Britain and Germany sign the Anglo-German Treaty, agreeing to maintain territorial integrity of China and support ‘open door’ policy called for by US Secretary of State
1901 President Theodore Roosevelt incites controversy by inviting black leader Booker T. Washington to the White House.
1916 Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in New York City.
1925 Texas School Board prohibits teaching of evolution
1934 Mao Zedong and 25,000 troops begin their 6,000 mile Long March from the south of China to the north and west
1940 Benjamin O. Davis becomes the U.S. Army’s first African American Brigadier General.
1964 China detonated its first atomic bomb becoming the world’s fifth nuclear power.
1973 Israeli General Ariel Sharon crosses the Suez Canal and begins to encircle two Egyptian armies.
1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla elected Pope John Paul II
1984 A baboon heart is transplanted into 15-day-old Baby Fae–the first transplant of the kind–at Loma Linda University Medical Center, California. Baby Fae lives until November 15.
1987 Rescuers freed Jessica McClure from the abandoned well that she had fallen into in Midland, TX. She was trapped for 58 hours.
1989 U.S. President George H.W. Bush signed the Gramm-Rudman budget reduction law that ordered federal programs be cut by $16.1 billion.
1995 Hundreds of thousands of black men gathered in Washington for the “Million Man March” led by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
2001 Twelve Senate offices were closed when a letter to Sen. Tom Daschle was found to contain anthrax.
2002 The White House announced that North Korea had disclosed the existence of a secret nuclear weapons program.
2002 The Arthur Andersen accounting firm was sentenced to five years probation and fined $500,000 for obstructing a federeal investigation of the energy company Enron.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
