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 The Collegiate School was founded in Killingworth, CT. The school moved to New Haven in 1745 and changed its name to Yale College.
1775 Portland, Maine burned by British
1793 Queen Marie Antoinette is beheaded by guillotine during the French Revolution.
1813 Battle of Leipzig, largest battle in Europe prior to WWI, Napoleon’s forces defeated by Prussia, Austria and Russia
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.
1923 The Walt Disney Company is Founded
1925 Texas School Board prohibits teaching of evolution
1934 Mao Tse-tung decides to abandon his base in Kiangsi due to attacks from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. With his pregnant wife and about 30,000 Red Army troops, he sets out on the “Long March.”
1940 Benjamin O. Davis becomes the U.S. Army’s first African American Brigadier General.
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis begins as JFK is shown photos confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba
1973 Israeli General Ariel Sharon crosses the Suez Canal and begins to encircle two Egyptian armies.
1978 The college of cardinals elects 58-year-old Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, a Pole, the first non-Italian Pope since 1523.
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.
1986 US govt closes down due to budget problems
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.
1991 George Jo Hennard, 35, kills 23 & himself & wounds 20 in Texas
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 Inaugural opening of Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt., a modern library and cultural center commemorating the famed Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity
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.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
