This Week in History 10/31 – 11/6

This Week in History

October 31:

• Ezra reads the Book of the Law to the Israelites in Jerusalem recorded in Nehemiah 9:1 (445 BC)
• Martin Luther nailed 95 theses on a church door in Germany beginning the Protestant Reformation (1517)
• Michelangelo Buonarroti finishes painting The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican  (1541)
• WW2: Spanish flu-virus kills 21,000 in US in one week (1918)
• Iraq announces it would no longer cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors (1998)
• Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran Church leaders sign the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, ending a centuries-old doctrinal dispute over the nature of faith and salvation (1999)
• Vietnam War: President Johnson orders a halt to all bombing of North Vietnam (1968)
• WW2: Battle of Britain ends (1940)
• WW2: Deadline for Warsaw Jews to move into Warsaw Ghetto (1940)
• First US paved coast-to-coast highway, the Lincoln Highway, is dedicated (1913)
• Mount Rushmore Monument is completed (1941)
• WW1: Great Britain & France declare war on Ottoman Empire (1914)
• Harry Houdini died when his appendix ruptured (1926)
• The world population reaches 7 billion inhabitants according to the United Nations (2011)
• Nevada becomes the 36th US state (1864)
• Clothing factory fire in Huddersfield, England kills 49 (1941)
• French Revolution: Execution of Girondins at Paris during Reign of Terror (1793)
• Great Depression: In an effort to try restore investor confidence, the New York Stock Exchange unveils a fifteen-point program aimed to upgrade protection for the investing public (1938)
• Sir Humphrey Davy of London patents miner’s safety lamp (1815)
• Arthur Conan Doyle publishes The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
• The New York stock exchange opens after being closed for two days after Hurricane Sandy (2012)
• George Washington Doane was consecrated as America’s first Episcopal bishop (1832)

November 1:

• Michelangelo, 37, unveiled his 5,808-square-foot masterpiece, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican (1512)
• US Revolutionary War: Stamp Act goes into effect in British colonies (1765)
• Pastor Paul Hamberg and seven members of Azerbaijan’s Lutheran community, including three women, executed by Stalinists (1937)
• First US women’s medical school opens in Boston (1848)
• John Adams becomes the first US president to live in White House (1800)
• US Weather Bureau begins operations (1870)
• First free school in New York City, African Free School, opens (1787)
• Vaccine for diphtheria announced by Dr Roux of Paris (1894)
• Fire at Plymouth, Massachusetts destroys several buildings (1623)
• Dupont introduces synthetic rubber (1931)
• WW1: First US soldier killed in combat (1917)
• Delegates meet at Chillicothe, Ohio to form a state constitutional convention (1802)
• First published reference to poker (1834)
• First Celebration of Authors Day (1928)
• All Saints Day made compulsory by Pope Gregory IV throughout Frankish Kingdom (825)
• First recorded use of modern name for Austria in the ‘Ostarrîchi Document’ (996)

November 2:

• General George Washington bids farewell to his army after the American Revolutionary War (1783)
• WW2: Auschwitz begins gassing inmates (1944)
• North Dakota, 39th, & South Dakota, 40th, become US states (1889)
• James A. Garfield, a lay-minister and Civil War hero, was elected president (1880)
• John Calvin fled persecution in Paris by being lowered over a wall in a basket (1533)
• French Revolution: the property of the Church in France was taken over by the state (1789)
• A combined attack by the Plymouth, Rhode Island, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies attacks the Great Swamp Fort owned by the Narragansetts during King Philip’s War (1675)
• New Jersey voters approve gambling for Atlantic City (1976)
• US Civil War: Western Department Union General John C. Fremont is relieved of command and replaced by David Hunter (1861)
• Balfour Declaration, calling for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” (1917)
• Velma Barfield becomes the first woman executed in the United States since 1962 (1984)
• Protestant Methodist Church was founded (1830)

November 3:

• US Supreme Court decides Native Americans can’t be Americans (1883)
• The Pentecostal Ministerial Alliance was organized (1925)
• USA introduces an income tax (1913)
• First live color US coast-to-coast telecast (1953)
• John Eliot, first Protestant missionary to Native Americans, arrived in America (1631)
• John Adams elected as 2nd US president (1796)
• D.C. residents cast first presidential votes (1964)
• John W. Menard of Louisiana elected as first black US Congressman (1868)
• Pliny Fisk, first American missionary to travel to the Near East, set sail for Palestine (1818)
• New York’s 104-storey One World Trade Center officially opens 13 years after the September 11 attacks (2014)
• Jews are expelled from France (1394)

November 4:

• 500 Iranian students seize US embassy and take 90 hostages in a crisis lasting 444 days (1979)
  
• The first church to become a Pentecostal Holiness denomination church was organized at Goldsboro, North Carolina under the leadership of Methodist evangelist Ambrose Blackman Crumpler (1898)
• Watchman Nee, Chinese theologian and author who died in prison for refusing to deny Christ, was born (1903)
• Future U.S. Senate Chaplain Reverend Peter Marshall married Catherine Wood. Following Peter’s premature death at age 46, Catherine immortalized his name through her best-selling biography, A Man Called Peter (1936)
• The Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law making it a capital offense to deny that the Bible was the Word of God (1646)
• First wagon train arrives in California (1841)
• US President Ronald Reagan defeats President Jimmy Carter in a landslide winning 44 states (1980)
• London’s Evening Standard Newspaper published John Lennon’s controversial remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” (1966)
• First uniform US election day (1845)
• Elkins patents refrigerating apparatus (1879)
• James Ritty patents first cash register (1879)
• Barack Obama elected first African-American president (2008)

November 5:

• US Revolutionary War: John Hancock is elected as moderator at a Boston town meeting that resolves that anyone who supports the Tea Act is an “Enemy to America” (1773)
• US Revolutionary War: John Hanson elected first “President of US in Congress assembled” (1781)
• US state Utah accepts female suffrage (1895)
• American women’s right to vote advocate Susan B. Anthony votes for Ulysses S. Grant (1872)
• US Revolutionary War: USS Ranger, with a crew of 140 men under the command of John Paul Jones, sets sail (1777)
• Louisa Woosley first women to be ordained as a minister in any Presbyterian denomination (1889)
• George B. Selden granted first US patent granted for an automobile for gasoline driven car (1895)
• Sinclair Lewis is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1930)
• Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declares US “The Great Satan” (1979)
• Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq, and his co-defendants Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar are sentenced to death in the al-Dujail trial for the role in the massacre of the 148 Shi’as in 1982 (2006)
• The Nat King Cole Show debuts on NBC, the first variety program to be hosted by an African-American (1956)
• Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision program was first broadcast over television (1950)
• First post office in the colonies is set up in Massachusetts (1639)
• Gunpowder Plot to attempt to blow up King James I and parliament discovered (1605)

November 6:

• US Civil War: Abraham Lincoln elected 16th American President (1860)
• US Civil War: Jefferson Davis elected to 6 year term as US Confederate President (1861)
• US Civil War: CSS Shenandoah is the last Confederate combat unit to surrender after circumnavigating the globe on its cruise that sank or captured 37 vessels (1865)
• New York State adopts a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote in state elections (1917)
• RCA displays TV for press (1936)
• Entire NBC line-up of TV shows in color for the first time (1966)
• Father John Carroll was appointed the first Roman Catholic bishop in the newly organized and independent United States of America (1789)
• Shipwrecked Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca becomes the first known European to set foot in Texas (1528)