Today in history, Nov 12th!

Some of the great historical events that happened today in history, on November 12th!

1859	The first flying-trapeze circus act is performed by Jules Leotard at the Circus Napoleon.
1863	Confederate General James Longstreet arrives at Loudon, Tennessee, to assist the attack on Union General Ambrose Burnside’s troops at Knoxville.
1867	Mount Vesuvius erupts.
1903	The Lebaudy brothers of France set an air-travel distance record of 34 miles in a dirigible.
1920	Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was elected baseball’s first commissioner.
1923	Adolf Hitler is arrested for his attempted German coup.
1927	Canada is admitted to the League of Nations.
1928	The ocean liner Vestris sinks off the Virginia cape with 328 aboard, killing 111.
1938	Mexico agrees to compensate the United States for land seizures.
1941	Madame Lillian Evanti and Mary Cardwell Dawson establish the National Negro Opera Company.
1942	The World War II naval Battle of Guadalcanal began.
1944	U.S. fighters wipe out a Japanese convoy near Leyte, consisting of six destroyers, four transports and 8,000 troops.
1944	The German battleship Tirpitz is sunk in a Norwegian fjord.
1948	Former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo and several other World War II Japanese leaders were sentenced to death by a war crimes tribunal.
1951	The U.S. Eighth Army in Korea is ordered to cease offensive operations and begin an active defense.
1954	Ellis Island closed after processing more than 20 million immigrants since opening in New York Harbor in 1892.
1960	The satellite Discoverer XVII is launched into orbit from California’s Vandenberg AFB.
1968	The U.S. Supreme Court voids an Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.
1971	President Richard Nixon announces the withdrawal of about 45,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam by February.
1982	Yuri V. Andropov was elected to succeed the late Leonid I. Brezhnev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee.
1985	Xavier Suarez was elected Miami’s first Cuban-American mayor.
1987	Boris Yeltsin is fired as head of Moscow’s Communist Party for criticizing the slow pace of reform.
1990	Japanese Emperor Akihito formally assumed the Chrysanthemum Throne.
1997	Ramzi Yousef was found guilty of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
1999	President Bill Clinton signed a sweeping measure knocking down Depression-era barriers and allowing banks, investment firms and insurance companies to sell each other’s products.
2001	An American Airlines flight crashed near New York’s Kennedy airport, killing 265 people.
2004	A jury convicted Scott Peterson of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and dumping her body in San Francisco Bay. (Peterson was later sentenced to death.)
2009	Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder in the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre.
2011	The Arab League voted to suspend Syria over the country’s bloody crackdown on protesters.

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.

http://hankeringforhistory.com/2012/11/12/today-in-history-nov-12th/