Paraskevidekatriaphobia: Fear of Friday the 13th

Courtesy of Working For Change, here are some events from today in history that you probably didn't learn in school:

1635: First public school in the U.S. (the Boston Latin School) is founded.

1837: Flour riot in New York City, early U.S. riot of the poor against property. Six thousand New Yorkers assault local flour merchants who, they claim, are hoarding flour in order to drive up the price.

1874: U.S. troops land in Honolulu, in the independent country of Hawai'i.

1907: English suffragettes storm British Parliament; sixty women are arrested.

1917: Strikes and meetings held in Petrograd factories: beginning of the Russian Revolution.

1945: Over 135,000 killed, mostly civilians, in Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. In a three-day period, 3,400 tons of explosives and incendiaries were dropped, reducing six square miles of the city to rubble. Many Allied officials were outraged--Germany was clearly on the verge of collapse, and Dresden was not a German war production city. Dresden had been famous for its artwork and historic buildings until it became the victim of the single most destructive air raid of World War II.

1946: Isaac Woodard blinded by Atlanta police while being abused in custody, less than three hours after the African-American soldier had received his honorable discharge from the armed forces. Immortalized in a Woody Guthrie song, "The Blinding of Isaac Woodard."

1949: Ecuadorian mob burns down radio station following broadcast of "War of the Worlds."

1960: France becomes the fourth nuclear power, conducting first nuclear test in Algaria's Sahara Desert.

1967: U.S.S.R. and China exchange gunfire on Manchurian border.

1970: Women take over underground rock station WBCN in Boston.

1974: Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn expelled from the Soviet Union.

1981: Longest sentence ever published by the New York Times: 1,286 words.

1982: Fifteen thousand blacks amd whites attend the funeral of South African trade union organizer Neill Aggett to protest and commemorate his death.

1989: Salvadoran army attacks Encuentros hospital, rapes, kills patients.

1991: During the Gulf War, approximately 400 Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, are killed during a U.S. laser-guided missile attack on the Amirayah (al-Firdos) fortified bunker on the west side of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.

1995: Chase Manhattan Bank distances itself from a newsletter produced by its Emerging Markets Group calling on Mexico to "eliminate the Zapatista" rebels in Mexico, according to the New York Times. Authored by Riordan Roett, director of Latin American Studies at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, analysts pointed to the uprising in Chiapas as a major element in the flight of foreign investors that weakened the Mexican peso. Mexican security forces began a large-scale takeover of former rebel areas on February 9, less than a month after the memo was published. Mexican security forces engaged in widespread violation of the human rights of citizens in the region (which still continues to this day.) Roett also suggested the Mexican government might not find it convenient to honor the results of upcoming elections.

(I suggest you check out Howard Zinn's work if yr interested in more 'little-known' history.)