TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 18
1009 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is destroyed by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who hacks the Church’s foundations down to bedrock
1469 Ferdinand II of Aragón married Isabella of Castile, uniting Spain and making it a dominant world power.
1648 The “shoemakers of Boston”–the first labor organization in what would become the United States–was authorized by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1685 French King Louis XIV revokes Edict of Nantes cancelling rights of French Protestants
1767 The boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Mason-Dixon line, was agreed upon.
1776 In a NY bar decorated with bird tail, customer orders “cock tail”
1851 Moby Dick is Published for the First Time
1862 Morgan’s raiders capture the federal garrison at Lexington, KY
1867 The Alaska territory is formally transferred to the U.S. from Russian control.
1873 The first rules for intercollegiate football were drawn up by representatives from Rutgers, Yale, Columbia and Princeton Universities.
1883 The weather station at the top of Ben Nevis, Scotland, the highest mountain in Britain, is declared open. Weather stations were set up on the tops of mountains all over Europe and the Eastern United States in order to gather information for the new weather forecasts.
1898 American flag raised in Puerto Rico
1912 The First Balkan War breaks out between the members of the Balkan League–Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro–and the Ottoman Empire.
1929 The Judicial Committee of England’s Privy Council ruled that women were to be considered as persons in Canada.
1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt bans war submarines from U.S. ports and waters.
1967 A Russian unmanned spacecraft makes the first landing on the surface of Venus.
1983 General Motors agreed to hire more women and minorities for five years as part of a settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
1990 Iraq made an offer to the world that it would sell oil for $21 a barrel. The price level was the same as it had been before the invasion of Kuwait.
1997 A monument honoring U.S. servicewomen, past and present, was dedicated at Arlington National Cemetery.
2007 Suicide attack on a motorcade in Karachi, Pakistan, kills at least 139 and wounds 450; the subject of the attack, Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, is not harmed.
2011 Gilad Shalit, a 25-year-old Israeli soldier, is released after being held for more than five years by Hamas. He is exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Shalit had been held in Gaza since Palestinian militants kidnapped him in 2006.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
