Welcome to today’s Tidbits of History, June 22nd!

1342 Bilbo Baggins returns to his home at Bag End, (Shire Reckoning)

1675 Royal Greenwich Observatory established in England by Charles I

1611 Henry Hudson set adrift in Hudson Bay by mutineers on his ship Discovery & never seen again

1633 Galileo Galilei forced to recant his Copernican views that the Earth orbits the Sun by the Pope (Oct 31 1992 Vatican admits it was wrong)

1775 First Continental currency issued ($3,000,000)

1807 British board USS Chesapeake, a provocation leading to War of 1812

1812 Upon learning of plans by the Americans to execute a surprise attack, Laura Secord walks 32 km to warn the British troops, which results in a British surprise victory at the Battle of Beaver Dams

1832 John Howe patents pin manufacturing machine

1847 First ring doughnut supposedly created by Hanson Gregory

1848 Barnburners (anti-slavery) party nominates Martin Van Buren for President

1868 Arkansas re-joins the US

1870 First Boardwalk in America invented

 

 

 

 

 

 

1870 US Congress creates Department of Justice

1874 Dr Andrew T Still, discovers the science of osteopathy

1874 Game of lawn tennis introduced

1910 First airship with passengers sets afloat-Zeppelin Deutschland

1915 BMT, then Brooklyn Rapid Transit, begins subway service

1934 John Dillinger is informally named America’s first Public Enemy Number One

1937 Joe Louis KOs James J Braddock in 18 for heavyweight boxing titlev

1940 France falls to Nazi Germany; armistice signed, France disarms

1941 Various Communist and Socialist French Resistance movements merge to one group.

1942 Japanese submarine in mouth of Columbia River, Oregon – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Fort_Stevens

1943 W.E.B. Du Bois becomes first Black member of National Institute of Letters

1944 US President Franklin Roosevelt signs “GI Bill of Rights” (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act)

1957 Kansas City stops using streetcars in it’s transit system

1959 “Along Came Jones” by Coasters peaks at #9

1959 “Class” by Chubby Checker peaks at #38

1961 Beatles record Aint She Sweet, Cry for a Shadow, When the Saints Go Marching In, Why, Nobody’s Child & My Bonnie, in Hamburg

1962 First test flight of a Hovercraft

1964 1964 Civil rights workers disappear Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney are killed by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob near Meridian, Mississippi. They were there to investigate the burning of an African-American Church by the KKK.

1965 Mr. Tambourine Man is released, and the folk-rock revolution is on.the Byrds’ debut album, Mr. Tambourine Man, marked the beginning of the folk-rock revolution. In just a few months, the Byrds had become a household name, with a #1 single and a smash-hit album that married the ringing guitars and backbeat of the British Invasion with the harmonies and lyrical depth of folk to create an entirely new sound.

1966 Rolling Thunder raids continue U.S. planes strike North Vietnamese petroleum-storage facilities in a series of devastating raids. These missions were part of Operation Rolling Thunder, which had been launched in March 1965 after President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a sustained bombing campaign of North Vietnam

1968 “Here Come Da Judge” by The Buena Vistas peaks at #88

1969 Aretha Franklin arrested in Detroit for creating a disturbance in a parking lot. After paying a $50 fine, she accidentally ran over a road sign.

1969 Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catches fire due to pollution

1970 President Nixon signs 26th amendment (voting age lowered to 18)

1970 Supreme Court ruled juries of less than 12 are constitutional. In Burch v Louisiana, the Court found Louisiana’s law that allowed criminal convictions on 5 to 1 votes by a six-person jury violated the Sixth Amendment right, incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment, of defendants to a trial by jury. If a jury is to be as small as six, the Court said, the verdict has to be unanimous. http://tinyurl.com/yadgogb5

1973 George Harrison releases “Living in the Material World”

1973 Skylab 2’s astronauts land

1977 Former AG John Mitchell starts 19 months in Alabama prison, being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up, which he dubbed the “White House horrors.” http://tinyurl.com/y7e3pvb4

1977 Walt Disney’s “Rescuers” released

1980 Jim King begins riding Miracle Strip Roller coaster 368 hours

1981 John McEnroe exhibits a disgraceful act of misbehavior at Wimbledon

1981 Mark David Chapman pleads guilty to killing John Lennon

1982 Hinckley not guilty of attempted murder of President Regan by reason of insanity. He was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity. In the trial, Hinckley’s defense attorneys argued that their client was ill with narcissistic personality disorder, citing medical evidence, and had a pathological obsession with the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which the main character attempts to assassinate a fictional senator. His lawyers claimed that Hinckley had watched the movie more than a dozen times and they argued successfully that the move was the planning force behind the events. history.com: http://tinyurl.com/y9ksx23y

1983 “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” released in France

1983 First time a satellite is retrieved from orbit by Space Shuttle

1985 “Smuggler’s Blues” by Glenn Frey peaks at #12 ***

1990 Florida passes a law which prohibits wearing a thong bathing suit

1990 Adam Sandler joins “Saturday Night Live”

1990 Earthquake devastates Iran An earthquake near the Caspian Sea in Iran kills more than 50,000 and injures another 135,000 people on this day in 1990. The 7.7-magnitude tremor wrecked havoc on the simply constructed houses in the area. A 20,000-square-mile area in the provinces of Zanjan and Gilan was absolutely devastated. This region encompasses both farms and sea resorts–all were demolished. In towns along one 80-mile stretch, every single building was reduced to rubble and every single resident was killed. history.com: http://tinyurl.com/m53ea8u

1991 Underwater volcano, Mount Didicas, erupts in Philippines

1992 Two skeletons excavated in Yekaterinburg, Russia identified as Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra

1992 Supreme Court rules “hate crime” laws violated free-speech rights. American Bar advises students: http://tinyurl.com/yd4p83uc “One way to deal effectively with hate speech is to create laws and policies that discourage bad behavior but do not punish bad beliefs. Another way of saying this is to create laws and policies that do not attempt to define hate speech as hate crimes, or “acts.” In two recent hate crime cases, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that acts, but not speech, may be regulated by law”

1993 Wilson Pickett plead guilty to auto assault due to drunk driving

2009 Two Metro subway trains collide in Washington, D.C., killing 9 and injuring over 80

2011 After hiding for 16 years, Boston gangster Whitey Bulger is arrested outside an apartment in Santa Monica, California

2015 South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley calls for the removal of the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds in wake of killings in a Charleston church

2015 JAMA Internal Medical Journal announces obese Americans now outnumber those just overweight