TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: SEPTEMBER 8
1504 Michelangelo’s 13-foot marble statue of David is unveiled in Florence, Italy.
1529 The Ottoman Sultan Suleiman re-enters Budapest and establishes John Zapolya as the puppet king of Hungary.
1565 A Spanish expedition established the first permanent European settlement in North America at present-day St. Augustine, FL.
1664 Dutch surrender New Amsterdam (NY) to 300 English soldiers
1760 The French surrender the city of Montreal to the British.
1892 An early version of “The Pledge of Allegiance” appeared in “The Youth’s Companion.”
1935 Senator Huey Long of Louisiana is shot to death in the state capitol, allegedly by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr.
1941 Entire Jewish community of Meretsch, Lithuania is exterminated
1945 Korea is partitioned by the Soviet Union and the United States.
1951 The San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed, formally ending World War II hostilities with Japan.
1960 President Dwight Eisenhower dedicates NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
1960 Penguin Books in Britain is charged with obscenity for trying to publish the D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
1965 Small ads in Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter attract 437 young men interested in forming the world’s first manufactured boy band, “The Monkees” – 3 are chosen with Davey Jones already having been cast
1970 Black September hijackings begin, three airliners hijacked and blown up by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
1974 President Gerald Ford gave former President Nixon a full pardon for all federal crimes he may have committed while he was in office.
1991 The republic of Macedonia Declares its Independence From Yugoslavia
2003 The Recording Industry Association of America (or RIAA) filed 261 copyright lawsuits against Internet users for trading songs online as part of the RIAA’s crackdown on peer-to-peer network users.
2011 Blackouts Southern California, Arizona and Mexico. The blackout occurred after a worker at an Arizona power substation turned off a piece of equipment that was being affected by extreme heat. The blackout left more than five million people without power.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
