TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: SEPTEMBER 28
0048 On landing in Egypt, Pompey is murdered on the orders of Ptolemy.
0935 Saint Wenceslas is murdered by his brother, Boleslaus I of Bohemia
1106 King Henry of England defeats his brother Robert at the Battle of Tinchebrai and reunites England and Normandy.
1238 James of Aragon retakes Valencia, Spain, from the Arabs.
1781 Siege of Yorktown begins, last battle of the Revolutionary War
1850 U.S. President Millard Fillmore named Brigham Young the first governor of the Utah territory. In 1857, U.S. President James Buchanan removed Young from the position.
1874 Colonel Ronald Mackenzie raids a war camp of Comanche and Kiowa at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, slaughtering 2,000 of their horses.
1887 Yellow River or Huáng Hé floods in China, killing between 900,000 and 2 million people, one of the deadliest natural disasters in history
1904 A woman is placed under arrest for smoking a cigarette on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
1906 US troops reoccupy Cuba, stay until 1909
1920 Eight Chicago White Sox players were indicted for fixing the 1919 World Series in the “Black Sox scandal.”
1928 Sir Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin when he notices a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory; it remained for Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to isolate the active ingredient, allowing the “miracle drug” to be developed in the 1940s.
1939 A German-Soviet agreement divided Poland between Nazi Germany and the USSR.
1961 Military coup in Damascus ends the Egypt-Syria union known as the United Arab Republic that was formed Feb. 1, 1958.
1963 Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art work Whaam!, depicting in comic-book style a US jet shooting down an enemy fighter, is exhibited for the first time; it will become one of the best known examples of pop art.
1974 1st lady Betty Ford undergoes a radical mastectomy
1980 Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage Makes its Debut
1995 Yasser Arafat of the PLO and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed an accord that transferred control of the West Bank.
1996 Afghanistan’s former president (1986-92) Mohammad Najibullah tortured and murdered by the Taliban.
1997 The 103rd convention of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) was held in New York City, NY. The official debut of the DVD format was featured.
2000 The U.S. Federal Drug Administration approved the use of RU-486 in the United States. The pill is used to induce an abortion.
2008 SpaceX launches the first private spacecraft, Falcon 1.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
