TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: SEPTEMBER 17
1394 Jews are expelled from France by order of King Charles VI
1683 Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is the first to report the existence of bacteria
1778 The United States signed its first treaty with a Native American tribe, the Delaware Nation.
1787 The Constitution was completed and signed by a majority of the delegates attending the constitutional convention in Philadelphia.
1862 The Battle of Antietam in Maryland, the bloodiest day in U.S. history, commences. Fighting in the corn field, Bloody Lane and Burnside’s Bridge rages all day as the Union and Confederate armies suffer a combined 26,293 casualties.
1868 The Battle of Beecher’s Island begins, in which Major George “Sandy” Forsyth and 50 volunteers hold off 500 Sioux and Cheyenne in eastern Colorado.
1903 Turks destroy the town of Kastoria in Bulgaria, killing 10,000 civilians.
1939 With the German army already attacking western Poland, the Soviet Union launches an invasion of eastern Poland.
1944 British airborne troops parachute into Holland to capture the Arnhem bridge as part of Operation Market-Garden. The plan called for the airborne troops to be relieved by British troops, but they were left stranded and eventually surrendered to the Germans.
1962 The first federal suit to end public school segregation is filed by the U.S. Justice Department.
1975 Rollout of 1st space shuttle orbiter Enterprise (OV-101)
1976 NASA publicly unveils space shuttle Enterprise in Palmdale, Calif
1978 Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter sign the Camp David Accords, frameworks for peace in the Middle East and between Egypt and Israel
1984 9,706 immigrants became naturalized citizens when they were sworn in by U.S. Vice-President George Bush in Miami, FL. It was the largest group to become U.S. citizens.
1986 US Senate confirms William Rehnquist as 16th chief justice
1998 The United States government offered a reward for the capture of Haroun Fazil for his role in the U.S. bombing in Kenya on August 7, 1998.
1998 The U.S. announced a plan that would compensate victims in the Kenya and Tanzania U.S. Embassy bombings on August 7, 1998.
2006 Alaska’s Fourpeaked Mountain erupts for the first time in at least 10,000 years.
2011 Occupy Wall Street movement calling for greater social and economic equality begins in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, coining the phrase “We are the 99%.”
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
