Friday 26 February 2016

On This Day In History - February 26th

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY - 26th FEBRUARY

On This Day in 1570 Elizabeth-The-First-Virginger-Queen was excommunicated by Pope-Pius-V-For-Vendetta for being ginger, and not catholic.
 
On This Day in 1616, after having a very rough week, Galileo Galilei, so good they named him twice, is formally banned from teaching or defending his views on the Earth orbiting the Sun, by the Catholic Church.
 
Burn the witch.
 
Hmm, I wonder if he was actually right about the Earth orbiting the sun? And, instead of being a witch, perhaps he was a scientist with real and factual scientific knowledge?
 
Nah, Burn the Witch.
 
On This Day in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act of Congress to establish the Grand Canyon, that massive hole in the ground that's hundreds of miles long, as a United States National Park.
 
On This Day in 1929, President Calvin Coolidge signed an Executive Order, because who needs an act of Congress when you're Calvin-Friggin-Coolidge, establishing the Grand Teton National Park, a 96,000 acre park in Wyoming.
 
On This Day in 1935, Adolf Hitler, everyone's favourite mass murdering psychopath dictator, ordered the Luftwaffe, or German Air Force, be re-formed.
 
This act violated the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. No one did much about it. Not as if the re-establishment of the Luftwaffe could do any harm in the future.
 
On This Day in 1993, six people are killed and over a thousand injured, when a truck bomb exploded below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, eight years before two planes were flown into them, which destroyed both towers.
 
On This Day in 1995, Barings Bank, the United Kingdom's oldest investment bank, collapsed when Nick Leeson, one of their securities brokers, lost over $1.4 billion speculating on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange.
 
It was made into a great movie starring Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Famous Birthdays
On This Day in 1846, Buffalo Bill was born. His real name was William Frederick Cody and he was a scout and bison hunter in the wild west, eventually becoming a showman and founding the Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1883.
 
On This Day in 1852, John Harvey Kellogg was born. He was an American doctor based in Michigan, who was also nutso-crazy, and ran a sanitarium which focused on nutrition, enemas, and exercise.
 
Of course, John Harvey Kellogg is most famed for creating the breakfast cereal Kellogg's Corn Flakes with his brother, Will Keith Kellogg.
 

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