TODAY IN HISTORY

On This Day in:

1521 – Ferdinand Magellan discovered Guam.

1808 – At Harvard University, the rst college orchestra was founded.

1820 – The Missouri Compromise was enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed by U.S. President James Monroe. The act admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state, but prohibited slavery in the rest of the northern Louisiana Purchase territory.

1834 – The city of York in Upper Canada was incorporated as Toronto. 1836 – The thirteen-day siege of the Alamo by Santa Anna and his army ended. The Mexican army of three thousand men defeated the 189 Texas volunteers.

1854 – At the Washington Monument, several men stole the Pope’s Stone from the lapidarium.

1857 – The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision ruled that black people could not sue in federal court to be citizens.

1886 – “The Nightingale” was rst published. It was the rst magazine for nurses.

1899 – Aspirin was patented by German researchers Felix Hoffman and Hermann Dreser.

1900 – In West Virginia, an explosion trapped 50 coal miners underground.

1901 – An assassin tried to kill Wilhelm II of Germany in Bremen.

1907 – British creditors of the Dominican Republic claimed that the U.S. had failed to collect debts.

1928 – A Communist attack on Peking, China resulted in 3,000 dead and 50,000 _ed to Swatow.

1939 – In Spain, Jose Miaja took over the Madrid government after a military coup and vowed to seek “peace with honor.”