TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – SEPT 15
1616 – First non-aristocratic, free public school in Europe is opened in Frascati, Italy
1775 – An early and unofficial American flag was raised by Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Mott after the seizing of Fort Johnson from the British. The flag was dark blue with the white word “Liberty” spelled on it.
1776 – The British occupy Manhattan.
1789 – The U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs changed its name to the Department of State.
1835 – HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin on board reaches the Galapagos Islands
1853 – Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell was ordained becoming first female minister in the United States.
1909 – Charles F. Kettering applied for a patent on his ignition system. His company Delco (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company) later became a subsidiary of General Motors.
1914 – President Woodrow Wilson orders the Punitive Expedition out of Mexico. The Expedition, headed by General John Pershing, had been searching for Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary.
1923 – Oklahoma was placed under martial law by Gov. John Calloway Walton due to terrorist activity by the Ku Klux Klan. After this declaration national newspapers began to expose the Klan and its criminal activities.
1928 – Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin while studying influenza
1935 – The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their citizenship and made the Swastika the official emblem of Nazi Germany.
1937 – Prime Minister of England Neville Chamberlain flies to Germany to discuss the future of Czechoslovakia with Adolf Hitler.
1959 – Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arrived in the U.S. to begin a 13-day visit.
1963 – Four young African-American girls are killed by the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama.
1966 – US President Lyndon Johnson urges Congress to adopt gun control legislation in the wake of Charles Whitman’s sniper attack from the University of Texas’s Texas Tower; in all, Whitman shot and killed 15 people before being shot dead himself by an Austin police officer.
1971 – Greenpeace was founded.
1981 – Sandra Day O’Connor is unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to become the first female justice on the US Supreme Court.
1998 – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the Iranian military to be on full alert and massed troops on its border with Afghanistan.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
