TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: OCTOBER 15
1529 Ottoman armies under Suleiman end their siege of Vienna and head back to Belgrade.
1582 The Gregorian (or New World) calendar is adopted in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal; and the preceding ten days are lost to history.
1815 Napoleon Bonaparte arrives on island of St Helena to begin his exile
1863 For the second time, the Confederate submarine H L Hunley sinks during a practice dive in Charleston Harbor, this time drowning its inventor along with seven crew members.
1860 Grace Bedell, 11 years old, wrote a letter to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. The letter stated that Lincoln would look better if he would grow a beard.
1883 US Supreme Court declares Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional
1892 The U.S. government announced that the land in the western Montana was open to settlers. The 1.8 million acres were bought from the Crow Indians for 50 cents per acre.
1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus arrested and accused of espionage in France
1914 Congress passes the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which labor leader Samuel Gompers calls “labor’s charter of freedom.” The act exempts unions from anti-trust laws; strikes, picketing and boycotting become legal; corporate interlocking directorates become illegal, as does setting prices which would effect a monopoly.
1917 Mata Hari, a Paris dancer, is executed by the French after being convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans.
1940 “The Great Dictator”, a satiric social commentary film by and starring Charlie Chaplin released
1946 Hermann Goering, a Nazi war criminal and founder of the Gestapo, poisoned himself just hours before his scheduled execution.
1951 I Love Lucy Airs for the First Time
1966 LBJ signs a bill creating US Department of Transportation
1966 Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale establish the Black Panther Party, an African-American revolutionary socialist political group, in the US.
1969 Rallies for The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam draw over 2 million demonstrators across the US, a quarter million of them in the nation’s capital.
1973 Tanks attack Thailand demonstrating students, 300 killed
1984 The Freedom of Information Act was passed.
1987 NFL Players Association orders an end to 24 day strike; union fails to achieve demands short-term with no collective bargaining agreement in place
1997 The Cassini-Huygens mission was launched from Cape Canaveral, FL. On January 14, 2005, a probe sent back pictures of Saturn’s moon Titan during and after landing.
2001 NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles of Jupiter’s moon Io.
2003 Shenzhou 5, China’s first human space flight mission launched
2008 Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets 733.08 points, the second-largest percentage drop in the Dow’s history. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-markets-stocks/dow-loses-733-after-data-feeds-recession-worry-idUSTRE49B3PW20081015
2017 60 Minutes and The Washington Post publish story detailing how Congress passed a bill sponsored by Tom Marino that hindered the fight against the opioid crisis
2018 Caravan of up to 4,000 Central American migrants that started in Honduras reaches Guatemala, heading for Mexico and the US
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
