1429 – Joan of Arc arrives at the siege of Orleans
1550 – Emperor Charles V gives inquisiters additional authority
1644 – Farm leader Li Zicheng becomes Emperor of China and flees Peking
1707 – English and Scottish parliaments accept Act of Union; creates the United Kingdom of Great Britain (comes into being 1st May)
1834 – Charles Darwin’s expedition sees the top of the Andes Mountains from Patagonia
1852 – The first edition of Peter Roget’s Thesaurus was published
1861 – The Maryland House of Delegates voted against seceding from Union.
1882 – The “Elektromote” – forerunner of the trolleybus – is tested by Werner von Siemens in Berlin
1894 – The 500-strong Commonwealth of Christ (Coxey’s Army) arrives in Washington, D.C., to protest against unemployment; Coxey arrested for trespassing at Capitol
1902 – Congress extends the Chinese Exclusion Act (of 1882) prohibiting immigration of Chinese laborers from territories to the mainland, a rule clearly aimed at Chinese in the Philippines
1916 – Irish republicans abandon the post office in Dublin and surrender unconditionally, marking the end of the Easter Rising
1926 – France and US reach accord on repayment of WW I
1945 – First food drop by RAF above Nazi-occupied Holland (Operation Manna)
1945 – A day before committing suicide, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun marry -On the same day, U.S. troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp near Munich.
1945 – The Nazi death camp, Dachau, was liberated.
1946 – Twenty-eight former Japanese leaders were indicted in Tokyo as war criminals.
1952 – IBM President Thomas J. Watson, Jr., informed his company’s stockholders that IBM was building “the most advanced, most flexible high-speed computer in the world.” The computer was unveiled April 7, 1953, as the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine.
1957 – 1st military nuclear power plant dedicated at Fort Belvoir, Virginia
1961 – ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” debuts
1974 – U.S. President Nixon announced he was releasing edited transcripts of secretly made White House tape recordings related to the Watergate scandal.
1975 – Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge are the last two United States servicemen killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War
1975 – The U.S. embassy in Vietnam was evacuated as North Vietnamese forces fought their way into Saigon.
1975 – Hubert van Es takes the famous picture of a helicopter airlift from a Saigon rooftop – The image shows South Vietnamese civilians employed by the U.S. trying to escape Saigon on the day before the city’s fall. It came to symbolize the American defeat in Vietnam.
1982 – American mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski murders pharmacist Paul Hoffman by beating him with a tire iron
1992 – Exxon executive Sidney Reso was kidnapped outside his Morris Township, NJ, home by Arthur Seale. Seale was a former Exxon security official. Reso died while in captivity.
1992 – Rioting began after a jury decision to acquit four Los Angeles policemen in the Rodney King beating trial. 54 people were killed in 3 days.
1998 – The U.S., Canada and Mexico end tariffs on $1 billion in NAFTA trade.
1998 – Brazil announced a plan to protect a large area of Amazon forest. The area was about the size of Colorado.
2002 – The United States is re-elected to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, one year after losing the seat it had held for 50 years
2004 – Dick Cheney and George W. Bush testify before the 9/11 Commission in a closed, unrecorded hearing in the Oval Office
2004 – Oldsmobile builds its final car ending 107 years of production
2005 – Syria completes withdrawal from Lebanon, ending 29 years of occupation
2015 – German Measles is declared eradicated from North and South America – 1st world region to do so
2019 – Islamic State releases video showing leader Bakr al-Baghdadi for first time in five years
2020 – A mile-wide asteroid named 1998 OR2 passes within 3.9 million miles of Earth
2020 – US GDP falls 4.8% for the financial quarter, officially ending the country’s growth streak. Worst contraction since 2008
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
