TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – OCT 21
1096 Seljuk Turks at Chivitot slaughter thousands of German crusaders.
1529 The Pope names Henry VIII of England Defender of the Faith after defending the seven sacraments against Luther.
1797 The navy frigate U.S. Constitution, known as “Old Ironsides,” was launched in Boston Harbor.
1805 Battle of Trafalgar: British Admiral Horatio Nelson defeats combined French and Spanish fleet. Nelson shot and killed during battle.
1837 Under a flag of truce during peace talks, U.S. troops siege the Indian Seminole Chief Osceola in Florida.
1849 The first tattooed man, James F. O’Connell, was put on exhibition at the Franklin Theatre in New York City, NY.
1854 Florence Nightingale with a staff of 38 nurses is sent to the Crimean War
1861 The Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Va. begins, a disastrous Union defeat which sparks Congressional investigations.
1872 The U.S. Naval Academy admits John H. Conyers, the first African American to be accepted.
1904 Panamanians clash with U.S. Marines in Panama in a brief uprising.
1910 A bomb explodes in the Los Angeles Times building killing 21 and injuring many more.
1917 The first U.S. soldiers entered combat during World War I near Nancy, France.
1927 The Chinese steamer Irene manned by British Officers was taken over by pirates masquerading as passengers
1940 Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published.
1944 HMAS Australia is attacked by the first kamikaze Attack when a Japanese aircraft carrying a 200 kg (441 lb) bomb strikes the superstructure, above the bridge
1948 UN rejects Russian proposal to destroy atomic weapons
1949 Harry S. Truman appoints the first female federal judge in the nation. Burnita Shelton Matthews from Hazelhurst, MS.
1959 The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens in Manhattan.
1965 Following the success of Disneyland in Anaheim, California (opened in 1955) Walt Disney buys 27,000 acres of land on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida (using dummy corporations to stop land speculators pushing up the price) for $5 million
1967 The “March on the Pentagon,” protesting American involvement in Vietnam , draws 50,000 protesters.
1973 President Nixon is seeking a 2.2 billion dollar military aide package for Israel.
1978 Massive raids by the Rhodesian army and air force on 12 black guerrilla bases in Zambia have left the death toll at over 1,500 and the Rhodesian Prime minister is blaming the British and American government for not arranging a cease fire with guerrillas as promised
1983 The United States sends a ten-ship task force to Grenada.
1986 In a satellite hook up from Antarctica scientists have been studying a huge hole that has appeared in the earths ozone layer over Antarctica. They believe it may have been caused by a chemical process and are suspecting the gas used in Aerosol Cans.
1991 Jesse Turner, an American hostage in Lebanon, was released after nearly five years of being imprisoned.
1994 North Korea and the US sign an agreement requiring North Korea to halts its nuclear weapons program and agree to international inspections.
2001 A Washington postal worker is confirmed as the ninth confirmed case of anthrax since anthrax infected mail began turning up in Florida, Washington and New York following the 11 September attacks
2002 An attempt to cripple the internet by attacking its central address books in a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDos) causes some problems and temporarily disables seven of the net’s 13 root servers, but due to the design of the Internet most users were not badly affected.
2003 Florida Governor Jeb Bush has ordered a feeding tube reinserted into Terry Schiavo, who suffered severe brain damage in 1990 the patient at the center of The Right To Die battle in Florida
2003 North Korea rejected U.S. President George W. Bush’s offer of a written pledge not to attack in exchange for the communist nation agreeing to end its nuclear weapons program.
2011 President Obama announced that all troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of December 2011, honoring the terms set between Iraq and the United States when George W. Bush was president. The war began in 2003 with 150,000 American troops. During the span of the war, around 4,400 US soldiers were killed and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians were estimated to have been killed
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
