Hankering For History: Historical events that happened today, October 12th, in history!

Here are some of the great historical events that happened today, October 12th, in history!

1492	Christopher Columbus and his crew land in the Bahamas.
1576	Rudolf II, the king of Hungary and Bohemia, succeeds his father, Maximillian II, as Holy Roman Emperor.
1609	The song “Three Blind Mice” is published in London, believed to be the earliest printed secular song.
1702	Admiral Sir George Rooke defeats the French fleet off Vigo.
1722	Shah Sultan Husayn surrenders the Persian capital of Isfahan to Afgan rebels after a seven month siege.
1809	Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, dies under mysterious circumstances in Tennessee.
1810	The German festival Oktoberfest was first held in Munich to celebrate the wedding of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.
1872	Apache leader Cochise signs a peace treaty with General Howard in Arizona Territory.
1899	The Anglo-Boer War begins.
1933	Alcatraz Island is made a federal maximum security prison.
1935	Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena, Italy.
1943	The U.S. Fifth Army begins an assault crossing of the Volturno River in Italy.
1949	Eugenie Anderson becomes the first woman U.S. ambassador.
1960	Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding a shoe on his desk.
1970	President Richard Nixon announces the pullout of 40,000 more American troops in Vietnam by Christmas.
1971	“Jesus Christ Superstar,” a rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, opened on Broadway.
1971	The House of Representatives passes the Equal Rights Amendment 354-23.
1973	President Richard Nixon nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president.
1984	British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.
1986	Superpower talks between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate.
1998	Matthew Shepard, a gay student at University of Wyoming, died five days after he was beaten, robbed and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie.
1999	Pakistan’s military overthrew the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
2000	Two al-Qaida suicide bombers in an explosives-laden boat rammed into the destroyer the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors.
2002	A bomb destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people. Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida were blamed.
2007	Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm over global warming.
2011	A Nigerian al-Qaida operative pleaded guilty to trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear minutes before the plane landed in Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was later sentenced to life in prison.)

Today’s historical facts are from various sites including, but not limited too: the History Channel, The New York Times, WHG Historynet.com, HistoryOrb.com, and On This Day blogs from my blogroll.