TODAY HISTORY LESSON: APRIL 4
1581 Francis Drake completes circumnavigation of the world.
1687 King James II ordered that his declaration of indulgence be read in church.
1789 1st US Congress begins regular sessions during George Washington’s presidency at Federal Hall, NYC (ending 1791)
1812 The territory of Orleans becomes the 18th state and will become known as Louisiana.
1818 The United States flag is declared to have 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars.
1841 President William Henry Harrison, aged 68, becomes the first president to die in office, just a month after being sworn in.
1902 British Financier Cecil Rhodes left $10 million in his will that would provide scholarships for Americans to Oxford University in England.
1917 The U.S. Senate voted 90-6 to enter World War I on the Allied side.
1918 Food riot in Amsterdam
1920 Arabs attack Jews in Jerusalem
1945 The Ohrdruf death camp was liberated from Nazi occupation.
1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) treaty is signed.
1953 Fifteen doctors were released by Soviet leaders. The doctors had been arrested before Stalin had died and were accused of plotting against him.
1967 Johnny Carson quit “The Tonight Show.” He returned three weeks later after getting a raise of $30,000 a week.
1969 Denton Cooley implants the first artificial heart
1968 US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee
1975 More than 130 people, most of them children, were killed when a U.S. Air Force transport plane evacuating Vietnamese orphans crashed just after takeoff from Saigon.
1975 Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800
1979 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the president of Pakistan is executed. The former President of Pakistan had been deposed by a coup d’etat. He was hanged despite international calls to stop the execution.
1983 Sally Ride became the first U.S. woman in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
1984 Winston Smith in Orwell’s “1984” begins his secret diary
1987 The U.S. charged the Soviet Union with wiretapping a U.S. Embassy.
1988 Arizona Governor Evan Mecham was voted out of office by the Arizona Senate. Mecham was found guilty of diverting state funds to his auto business and of trying to impede an investigation into a death threat to a grand jury witness.
1991 Pennsylvanian Senator John Heinz and six others were killed when a helicopter collided with Heinz’s plane over a schoolyard in Merion, PA.
1994 Netscape Communications founded as Mosaic Communications
2006 The Iraq tribunal announce criminal charges against Saddam Hussein and six others, accusing them of genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from a 1980s crackdown against Kurds
2008 A gunman has killed thirteen people after taking dozens hostage in New York. The gunman was found dead inside Binghampton’s immigration center. Around forty people had escaped from the building, but four others were critically injured in the shooting.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
