31 – 1st Easter, according to calendar-maker Dionysius Exiguus
421 – The city of Venice was founded.
1150 – Tichborne family of Hampshire England start tradition of giving gallon of flour to residents to keep deathbed promise
1199 – King Richard I (the Lion Heart) of England, is wounded by a crossbow bolt while fighting France, leads to his death on April 6
1306 – Robert the Bruce was crowned king of Scotland.
1634 – Lord Baltimore founded the Catholic colony of Maryland.
1655 – Christian Huygens discovered Titan. Titan is Saturn’s largest satellite.
1776 – The Continental Congress authorized a medal for General George Washington.
1807 – British Parliament abolishes slave trade throughout the British Empire; penalty of £120 per slave introduced for ship captains
1817 – Tsar Alexander I recommends formation of Society of Israeli Christians
1894 – Jacob Sechler Coxey and his “army” of unemployed men began their march from Ohio to Washington, DC.
1898 – Writer O. Henry sentenced to 5 years in prison for embezzling $854 from a bank reportedly to pay for his sick wife’s medical bills. Goes on to write many classics while in jail including “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking”.
1901 – It was reported in Washington, DC, that Cubans were beginning to fear annexation.
1902 – In Russia, 567 students were found guilty of “political disaffection.” 95 students were exiled to Siberia.
1905 – Rebel battle flags that were captured during the American Civil War were returned to the South.
1911 – In New York City, 146 women were killed in fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. The owners of the company were indicted on manslaughter charges because some of the employees had been behind locked doors in the factory. The owners were later acquitted and in 1914 they were ordered to pay damages to each of the twenty-three families that had sued.
1942 – 1st 700 Jews from Polish Lvov district reach the Bełżec Concentration camp
1949 – The Soviet Union begins Operation Pribioi, the mass deportation of 90,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to inhospitable areas in the Soviet Union
1965 – The 25,000-person Alabama Freedom March to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks, led by Martin Luther King Jr., ended its journey from Selma on the steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery, Ala.
1966 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the “poll tax” was unconstitutional.
1975 – King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot to death by a nephew. The nephew, with a history of mental illness, was beheaded the following June.
1987 – The US Supreme Court rules that gender-based workplace affirmative action plans do not constitute discrimination on the basis of sex under the Civil Rights Act 1964
1988 – Robert E. Chambers Jr. pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin. The case was known as New York City’s “preppie murder case.”
1988 – Thousands of people join the first peaceful demonstrations against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia
1994 – United States troops completed their withdrawal from Somalia.
1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world’s first wiki, is launched – Ward Cunningham introduced the wiki, or user-editable website. Today, Wikipedia is the world’s most well known and widely used wiki.
1996 – An 81-day standoff by the antigovernment Freemen began at a ranch near Jordan, MT.
1998 – A cancer patient was the first known to die under Oregon’s doctor-assisted suicide law.
2004 – The U.S. Senate voted (61-38) on the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (H.R. 1997) to make it a separate crime to harm a fetus during the commission of a violent federal crime.
2006 – Capitol Hill massacre: A gunman kills six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood
2006 – Protesters demanding a re-election in Belarus following the rigged Belarusian presidential election, 2006 clash with riot police. Opposition leader Aleksander Kozulin is among several protesters arrested.
2018 – North Korean leader Kim Jong un begins surprise trip to Beijing by train to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping
2019 – NASA cancels a planned historic all-female spacewalk because it doesn’t have enough spacesuits to fit women
2021 – Republican-led Georgia State Senate passes restrictive changes to state voting. President Joe Biden calls it “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “a blatant attack on the Constitution”.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
