This Week In #History ... June 13th - 19th

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @UlaVovk

Jun 13
1373 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of Alliance, world's oldest, signed in London
1774 Rhode Island becomes 1st colony to prohibit importation of slaves
1837 1st Mormon missionaries to British Isles leave Kirtland, Ohio
1895 Emile Levassor wins 1st Paris-Bordeaux-Paris auto race (24 kph)
1900 China's Boxer Rebellion against foreigners and Christians
1910 Pilot Charles Hamilton makes 1st 1-day round-trip from New York to Philadelphia
1922 Longest attack of hiccups begins Charlie Osborne, 98 hiccupped over 435 million times before it stops, He dies 11 months after it stops
1932 Great Britain and France sign peace treaty
1942 Franklin D. Roosevelt creates Office of War with Elmer Davis as head
1950 South African parliament accept "Groups Area Act"
1963 Vostok 6 launched, pilot is 1st woman cosmonaut
1971 New York Times began publishing "Pentagon Papers"
1981 Teenager fires 6 blanks at Queen Elizabeth II
1991 The National, 1st all-sports daily newspaper, ceases publication
2010 Ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan's city of Osh and Jalal-Abad left more than 100 people dead and over 1,400 injured after three days of four days of fighting

Jun 14
1623 1st breach-of-promise lawsuit: Reverend Gerville Pooley, Virginia files against Cicely Jordan, he loses
1834 Isaac Fischer, Jr. patents sandpaper
1881 Player piano patented by John McTammany, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass)
1901 1st golf championship is played
1919 1st nonstop air crossing of Atlantic (Alcock and Brown)
1929 Prussia and Vatican sign Concord
1938 Chlorophyll patented by Benjamin Grushkin
1942 Anne Frank begins her diary
1952 Keel laid for 1st nuclear powered sub Nautilus
1965 John Lennon's 2nd book "A Spaniard in the Works" is published
1975 U.S.S.R. launches Venera 10 for Venus landing
1985 Lebanese Shiite Muslim extremists hijacked TWA Flight 847
1992 Mona Van Duyn is named 1st female U.S. poet laureate
1998 "Comic Relief" benefit comedy show
2010 China's Premier, Wen Jiabao visits migrant workers at a Beijing construction site and declares the need for better treatment of the country's migrant workers

Jun 15
1215 King John signs Magna Carta at Runnymede, England
1664 New Jersey established
1844 Goodyear patents vulcanization of rubber
1869 Celluloid patented by John Wesley Hyatt, Albany, New York
1898 U.S. Marines attack Spanish off Guantanamo, Cuba
1908 World congress for Woman's rights opens in Amsterdam
1924 J. Edgar Hoover assumed leadership of the FBI
1934 Great Smokey Mountains National Park dedicated
1943 Congress of racial Equality (CORE) forms
1951 Joe Louis scored his last knock out victory
1960 Angel Cordero wins his 1st of over 7000 horse races
1972 West German police arrested RAF leader Ulrike Meinhof
1985 Russian space probe Vega 2 lands on Venus
1994 Disney's "Lion King," opens in theaters with $42 million
2010 The inquiry into Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, 1972, determined British paratroopers first the first shot without warning, and concocted lies to cover up their acts

Jun 16
1487 Battle at Stoke: Henry VII beats John de la Pole and Lord Lovell
1794 1st stone layed at Dutch biggest grain windmill (De Walvisch)
1858 Abraham Lincoln says "A house divided against itself cannot stand"
1893 R. W. Rueckheim invents Cracker Jack
1903 Pepsi Cola company forms & Ford Motors incorporates
1909 1st U.S. airplane sold commercially, by Glenn Curtiss for $5,000
1923 Sun Yat Sen founds military academy
1933 National Industrial Recovery Act becomes law, later struck down
1944 U.S. bombs Kyushu Japan
1953 Despite Johnny Mize 2,000th hit, Yankees lose ending 18 game win streak and also ending St. Louis Brown 14 game losing streak
1967 50,000 attend Monterey International Pop Festival
1975 Italy's Communist party PCI, wins
1983 European Space Agency launches European Comm Satellite 1, Oscar 10
1991 Boris Yeltsin elected president of Russian SSR
2010 In response to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, BP agrees to finance a $20 billion fund to compensate those whose livelihood has been damaged

Jun 17
1579 Sir Francis Drake lands on coast of California
1745 American colonials capture Louisburg, Cape Breton I from French
1837 Charles Goodyear obtains his 1st rubber patent
1885 Statue of Liberty arrived in New York City
1898 U.S. Senate agrees to annex Hawaii
1915 League to Enforce Peace forms in Philadelphia
1928 Amelia Earhart leaves Newfoundland to become 1st woman (passenger) to fly Atlantic (as a passenger in a plane piloted by Wilmer Stultz)
1938 Japan declares war on China
1946 SW Bell inaugurates mobile telephone commercial service, St. Louis
1960 Ted Williams hit his 500th home runs
1967 1st Chinese hydrogen bomb explodes
1973 1st du Maurier Golf Classic (La Canadienne): Jocelyne Bourassa
1982 President Reagan 1st United Nations General Assembly address, "evil empire" speech
1991 South Africa abolishes last of its apartheid laws
2010 BP CEO Tony Hayward testifies before the U.S. about the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster at the Deepwater Horizon rig that has caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history

Jun 18
1178 5 Canterbury monks report explosion on moon (only known observation)
1580 States of Utrecht forbid catholic worship
1815 Battle of Waterloo; Napoleon defeated by Wellington and Blucher
1898 1st amusement pier opens in Atlantic City, New Jersey
1903 1st transcontinental auto trip begins in San Francisco; arrives New York 3-months later
1914 Oscar Egg bicycles world record time (44,247 km)
1924 Pope Pius XI's encyclical Maximam gravissimamque
1936 1st bicycle traffic court in America established, Racine, Wisconsin
1945 William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) British radio traitor charged with treason
1953 Egypt proclaimed a republic, General Neguib becomes president
1963 3,000 blacks boycott Boston public school
1973 NCAA makes urine testing mandatory for participants
1981 Vaccine to prevent hoof and mouth disease announced
1989 Comet Churyunov-Gerasimenko at perihelion
1994 Gay Games open in New York City
2010 Roza Otunbayeva, interim leader of Kyrgyzstan, estimates the death toll from the country's worst ethnic battle in decades could be as many as 2,000 people

Jun 19
1464 French King Louis XI forms postal service
1829 Sir Robert Peel found London Metropolitan Police (Bobbies)
1865 Union General Granger declares slaves are free in Texas
1910 Father's Day celebrated for 1st time (Spokane, Wash)
1921 Turk and Christian of Palestine sign a friendship treaty against Jews 
1931 1st photoelectric cell installed commercially, West Haven, CT
1940 "Brenda Starr," 1st cartoon strip by a woman, appears in Chicago 
1947 1st plane (F-80) to exceed 600 mph (1004 kph)-Albert Boyd, Muroc Ca
1960 Juan Marichal debuts as San Francisco Giant pitcher, beats Phillies on 1 hitter
1970 Jim Bouton's controversial "Ball Four" is published
1978 Garfield, created by Jim Davis, 1st appears as a comic strip
1988 World's Largest Sausage completed at 13 miles long
1992 "Batman Returns" opens
2010 Rival clashes between nomadic groups in the Darfur region of Sudan kills at least 48 people

#nowyouknow

This Week In #History ... March 7-13th

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Ula Vovk

Mar 7
1778 Captain James Cook 1st sights Oregon coast, at Yaquina Bay
1854 Charles Miller patents 1st U.S. sewing machine to stitch buttonholes
1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents telephone
1908 Cincinnati Mayor Mark Breith stood before city council and announces that, "women are not physically fit to operate automobiles" ('scuse me?)
1911 Willis Farnsworth, Petaluma, California, patents coin-operated locker
1912 Roald Amundsen announces discovery of the South Pole
1926 1st transatlantic telephone call, London - New York
1933 Game of "Monopoly" invented
1954 Russia wins title in their 1st international ice hockey competition
1962 Launch of OSO 1, 1st astronomy satellite (solar flare data)
1981 1st homicide at Disneyland, 18 year old is stabbed to death
1996 1st surface photos of Pluto by Hubble Space Telescope
2010 Iraqi voters take part in parliamentary elections and a referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement


Mar 8
1855 1st train crosses 1st U.S. railway suspension bridge, Niagara Falls
1887 Everett Horton, Connecticut, patents fishing rod of telescoping steel tubes
1910 Baroness Raymonde de Laroche of Paris is 1st licensed female pilot
1911 1st International Woman's Day
1927 Pan American Airlines incorporates
1941 1st baseball player drafted into WW II (Hugh Mulcahy, Phillies)
1946 1st helicopter licensed for commercial use (New York City)
1961 U.S. nuclear submarine Patrick Henry arrives at Scottish naval base of Holy Loch from South Carolina in a record underseas journey of 66 days 22 hours
1965 1st U.S. combat forces arrive in Vietnam (3,500 Marines)
1972 1st flight of the Goodyear blimp
1986 Martina Navratilova is 1st tennis player to earn $10 million
2010 35 suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia are captured by the French Navy, the European Union's most successful mission


Mar 9
1497 Nicolaus Copernicus 1st recorded astronomical observation
1562 Kissing in public banned in Naples (punishable by death)
1798 Dr. George Balfour becomes 1st naval surgeon in the U.S. navy
1858 Albert Potts of Philadelphia patents the street mailbox
1882 False teeth patented
1907 1st involuntary sterilization law enacted, Indiana
1918 Russian Bolshevik Party becomes the Communist Party
1945 Japanese proclaim "independence" of Indo-China
1953 Josef Stalin buried in Moscow
1959 Barbie, the popular girls' doll, debuted, over 800 million sold
1964 1st Ford Mustang produced
1986 Soviet probe Vega 2 flies by Halley's Comet at 8,030 km
2010 Alphalara itadori, a Japanese insect that combats invasive Japanese knotweed, is the first biocontrol agent approved by the European Union


Mar 10
1791 John Stone, Concord, Massachusetts, patents a pile driver
1862 U.S. issues 1st paper money ($5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $500 and $1000)
1876 1st telephone call made (Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Watson)
1910 China ends slavery
1925 Walter Mittelholzer is 1st to flies over Demawend mountain, Iran
1933 Nevada becomes 1st U.S. state to regulate narcotics
1945 Japan declares Vietnam Independence
1951 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declines post of baseball commissioner
1975 Dog spectacles patented in England
1987 Vatican formal opposition to test-tube fertilization and embryo transfer
2006 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter enters Mars orbit


Mar 11
1302 Romeo and Juliet's wedding day, according to Shakespeare
1669 Volcano Etna in Italy erupts killing 15,000
1702 1st English daily newspaper "Daily Courant," publishes
1850 Woman's Medical College of Penn. (1st female medical school)
1917 British troops occupy Baghdad
1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Lend-Lease Bill to lend money to Britain
1953 1st woman army doctor commissioned (FM Adams)
1960 Pioneer 5 launched into solar orbit between Earth and Venus
1974 Rhino Store gives people 5 cents to take home Danny Bonaduce's Album
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev replaces Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader
1997 Ashes of Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry are launched into space
2006 Slobodan Milosevic found dead in cell in the Hague


Mar 12
1365 University of Vienna founded
1642 Abel Tasman is 1st European in New Zealand
1755 1st steam engine in America installed, to pump water from a mine
1849 1st gold seekers arrive in Nicaragua en route to California
1868 Congress abolishes manufacturer's tax
1896 1st movie in Netherlands (Kalverstr 220)
1904 1st main line electric train in U.K. (Liverpool to Southport)
1934 Josip Broz (Tito) freed from jail
1945 New York is 1st to prohibit discrimination by race and creed in employment
1958 British Empire Day is renamed "Commonwealth Day"
1970 U.S. lowers voting age from 21 to 18
1981 Soyuz T-4 carries 2 cosmonauts to Salyut 6 space station
1994 Church of England ordains 1st 33 women priests


Mar 13
1519 Cortez lands in Mexico
1639 Cambridge College renamed Harvard for clergyman John Harvard
1887 Chester Greenwood of Maine patents earmuffs
1894 J L Johnstone of England invents horse racing starting gate
1921 Mongolia (formerly Outer Mongolia) declares independence from China
1930 Clyde Tombaugh announces discovery of Pluto at Lowell Observatory
1943 Failed assassin attempt on Hitler during Smolensk-Rastenburg flight
1961 John F. Kennedy sets up the Alliance for Progress
1969 Apollo 9 returns to Earth
1979 European Monetary System is established, ECU created
1987 John Gotti is acquitted of racketeering
2010 Six people are killed by a remotely operated bomb while travelling in southern Afghanistan in Tirin Kot, the capital of Afghanistan's Uruzgan province

This Week In #History ... January 31 - February 6th

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @UlaVovk

Jan 31

1928 Scotch tape 1st marketed by 3-M Company
1930 1st U.S. glider flight from a dirigible, Lakehurst, New Jersey
1943 General Friedrich von Paul surrenders to Russian troops at Stalingrad
1955 RCA demonstrates 1st music synthesizer
1958 U.S. launches their 1st artificial satellite, Explorer 1
2010 A 5.2 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan province, China, destroys at least 100 homes, injures 11 and kills one person

Happy birthday to Pieter de Bloot, Robert Morris, Franz Anton graaf von Kolowrat, Bernard Barton, Louis Angely, Franz Peter Schubert, Jan C J van Speijk, Jozsef Bajza, Samuel Sarphati, Emil Strauss, Theodore William Richards, Zane Grey, Willem J M van Eysinga, Joseph A. Cushman, Nicholas Joy, Adolf Bach, Freya Stark, Blaž Arnič, Alva Myrdal, Tallulah Bankhead, E van Ruller, Rene Simone Mathieu, Louis Osman, Thomas Merton, John Agar, Norman Mailer, Eddie Ryder, Jean Simmons, Rudolf Mossbauer, Suzanne Pleshette, Jessica Walter, Jonathan Banks, Shirley F Babashoff, Scott Ian Rosenfeld, John Dye, Minnie Driver, Justin Timberlake.

Feb 1

1884 1st volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, A-Ant, published
1920 1st commercial armored car introduced in St. Paul, Minn.
1951 1st X-ray moving picture process demonstrated
1965 Martin Luther King, Jr. and 700 demonstrators arrested in Selma, Alabama
1972 1st scientific hand-held calculator, the HP-35, introduced for $395
1982 "Late Night With David Letterman," debuts on NBC-TV
2003 Space Shuttle Columbia destroyed over Texas when returning to Earth, 7 crew members are killed

Happy birthday to Konrad E Ackermann, John P Kemble, Thomas Campbell, Charles J Sax, G. Stanley Hall, Victor August Herbert, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Eddie Pola, Hattie Wyatt Caraway, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Dirk Roosenburg, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, John Ford, Clark Gable, S J Perelman, Emilio Segre, Alan Strode Campbell Ross, Albie Booth, Michael Kanin, Stanley Matthews, Galway Kinnell, Madeline Berthod, John Nott, Garrett Morris, Sherman Hemsley, Bibi Besch, Tina Sloan, Bart Braverman, Gilbert Hernandez, Gabrielle Carteris, Stephanie Marie Elisabeth de Grimaldi, Brandon Lee, Lisa Marie Presley, Jennifer Lien.

Feb 2

1852 1st British public men's toilet opens (Fleet St. London)
1892 Bottle cap with cork seal patented by William Painter (Baltimore)
1931 1st use of a rocket to deliver mail, Austria
1935 Lie detector 1st used in court, Portage, Wisconsin
1962 8 of 9 planets align for 1st time in 400 years
1977 Radio Shack officially begins creating TRS-80 computer
2010 The World Food Programme reports that 4.3 million people suffer from hunger in Sudan, the number has quadrupled since 2009

Happy birthday to Jacob van Campen, Hannah More, Jean-Baptiste JD Boussingault, John Glover, Jan Six, Henry Ellis, Margot Asquith, Fritz Kreisler, Karl Frederick, James Joyce, Kurt Baschwitz, George S Halas, Jane Wilde, Connie Gilchrist, Clarence "Buster" Crabbe, Wanda Lewis, Elaine Stritch, Howard Caine, Clyde Skip Batten, Thomas Michael Disch, Bo Hopkins, Barry Diller, Katherine Crawford, Barbara Sukowa, Shakira.

Feb 3

1815 World's 1st commercial cheese factory established, in Switzerland
1876 Albert Spalding with $800 starts sporting goods company, manufacturing 1st official baseball, tennis ball, basketball, golf ball, and football
1945 Almost 1000 Flying Fortresses drop 3000 ton bombs on Berlin
1962 President Kennedy bans all trade with Cuba except for food and drugs
1998 Stamps commemorating Princess Diana go on sale across Britain
2010 Somali pirates seize a North-Korean flagged cargo ship south of Yemen

Happy birthday to Charles VI, Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Elizabeth Blackwell, Walter Bagehot, Norman Rockwell, Paul Urysohn, Peggy Ann Garner, Jeremy Kemp, Deszo Nowak, Bridget Hanley, Blythe Danner, Morgan Fairchild, Felipe Munoz, Nathan Lane, Lee Crystal, Loi Tolhurst, Keith Gordon, Jason Morris, Isla Fisher, Maitland Ward.

Feb 4

1824 J. W. Goodrich introduces rubber galoshes to public
1895 1st rolling lift bridge opens, Chicago
1920 1st flight from London to South Africa takes-off
1924 1st Winter Olympic games close at Chamonix, France
1936 1st radioactive substance produced synthetically (radium E)
1971 Apollo 14 lander Antares lands on Moon (Shepard and Mitchell)
1985 20 countries (but not U.S.) sign United Nations treaty outlawing torture
2010 Yahoo! sells HotJobs to Monster.com for a reported $225 million

Happy birthday to George Lillo, Carel H Verhuell, Maurits C van Hall, Mark Hopkins, Joshua Norton, Clement Ader, Francois-Victor-Jean Aicard, Constance Gore-booth Markiewicz, Ludwig Prandtl, Fernand Leger, Walter Catlett, Raymond Dart, Bernard Rogers, Charles Lindbergh, Alexander Oppenheim, Eddie Foy, Jr., Clyde William Tombaugh, David Lavender, Ida Lupino, Ray Evans, Norman Wisdom, Betty Friedan, Dave Ketchum, Gary Conway, Magnar Solberg, John Devitt, Collin Wilcox, John Steel, Jeannie Wilson, Pamela Franklin, Werner Schwab, Sergei Grinkov, Gabrielle Anwar, Oscar de la Hoya, Natalie Imbruglia, Gavin DeGraw.

Feb 5

1850 Adding machine employing depressible keys patented, New Paltz, New York
1861 1st moving picture peep show machine is patented by Samuel Goodale
1922 Reader's Digest magazine 1st published
1958 Gamel Abdel Nasser nominated 1st president of United Arab Republic
1974 U.S. Mariner 10 returns 1st close-up photos of Venus' cloud structure
1991 Howard Stern kisses New York Giant Leonard Marshall's ass over bet Stern lost claiming the Giants would lose the Superbowl
2010 Danish special forces storm a ship captured by Somali pirates, freeing 25 crewmembers on board

Happy birthday to Marie de Sevigne, John Witherspoon, John Jeffries, Christian Gottlob Neefe, Alexandre Brongniart, Robert "Bobbie" Peel, John Lindley, John Watkinson, John Boyd Dunlop, Hiram Stevens Maxim, Belle Starr [Myra Belle Shirley], Henri [Hendrik J] Hall, Andre-Gustave Citroen, Edward Rigby, Karl L Schmidt, Dirk U Stikker, John Carradine, Willard Parker, Alan Hodgkin, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charles J "Tim" Holt, John M Pritchard, Nick Georgiade, Stuart Damon, David Selby, Nolan Bushnell, Michael Mann, Charles Winfield, Al Kooper, Errol Morris, Christopher Guest, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Meadows, Dennis Hall, Diego Serrano, Cristiano Ronaldo.

Feb 6

1869 Harper's Weekly publishes 1st picture of Uncle Sam with chin whiskers
1935 Monopoly board game goes on sale for 1st time
1948 KNXT (now KCBS) TV channel 2 in Los Angeles, California (CBS) 1st broadcast
1974 U.S. House of Representatives begins determining grounds for impeachment of Nixon
1987 No-smoking rules take effect in federal buildings
2010 The Taliban blow up a girls' school in Huwaid, Pakistan, no one is killed

Happy birthday to Anne Stuart, Theodore Caruelle d'Aligny, José María de Pereda y Sánchez Porrúa, Henry Irving, John Henry Mackay, Karl T Sapper, Louis Pierard, Anton Hermann Fokker, Alberto [de Almeida] Cavalcanti, Ben Lyon, Irmgard Keun, Ronald Reagan, John Edward Christopher Hill, Eva Braun, Mary Leakey, John Lund, Patrick MacNee, Sixten Jernberg, Keith Waterhouse, Wies Andersen, Mike Farrell, Stephen Albert, Gigi Perreau, Gayle Hunnicutt, Natalie Cole, Linda Grovenor, Robert Townsend, Barry Miller, Megan Gallagher, April Lerman, Jeff Rouse, Brandon Hammond.