1242 – Russian troops repelled an invasion attempt by the Teutonic Knights.
1424 – Scottish King James I returns to Scotland after 18 years of detention at the English court
1614 – American Indian Pocahontas married English colonist John Rolfe in Virginia.
1621 – The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, MA, on a return trip to England.
1722 – Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen is the first European to discover Easter Island / Rapa Nui in the southeastern Pacific
1764 – British Parliament passes the Sugar Tax on the American colonies, introduced by Prime Minister George Grenville
1818 – In the Battle of Maipú, Chile’s independence movement – led by Bernardo O’Higgins and José de San Martín – win a decisive victory over Spain, leaving 2,000 Spaniards and 1,000 Chilean patriots dead.
1843 – Queen Victoria proclaimed Hong Kong to be a British crown colony.
1887 – Anne Sullivan taught Helen Keller the meaning of the word “water” as spelled out in the manual alphabet.
1893 – Cleveland passes Park Act (forerunner of Metroparks)
1894 – 11 strikers killed in riot at Connellsville, Penn
1895 – Playwright Oscar Wilde lost his criminal libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde had been accused of homosexual practices.
1930 – Mahatma Ghandi defied British law by making salt in India.
1932 – Dominion of Newfoundland: 10,000 rioters seize the Colonial Building leading to the end of self-government
1933 – The first operation to remove a lung was performed at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, MO.
1943 – Chinese steward Poon Lim is found off the coast of Brazil by a Brazilian fisherman family after being adrift 133 days, after British ship SS Benlomond torpedoed by German U-boat
1951 – Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, atomic spies, sentenced to death
1955 – Winston Churchill resigned as British prime minister.
1972 – The regular MLB season fails to open due to a player strike for the first time in history; 86 games are lost before the labor dispute settled
1986 – A discotheque in Berlin was bombed by Libyan terrorists. The U.S. attacked Libya with warplanes in retaliation on April 15, 1986.
1987 – FOX Broadcasting Company launched “Married….With Children” and “The Tracey Ullman Show”. The two shows were the beginning of the FOX lineup.
1989 – In Poland, accords were signed between Solidarity and the government that set free elections for June 1989. The eight-year ban on Solidarity was also set to be lifted.
1990 – Paul Newman wins a court victory over Julius Gold, to keep giving all profits from Newman foods to charity
1992 – Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori suspends the constitution and dissolves Congress
1995 – Pages of Codex Argenteus (the Silver Bible), the oldest text in the Gothic language (5th century) stolen from Uppsala University Library, Sweden in broad daylight (recovered a month later)
1999 – Two Libyans suspected of bombing a Pan Am jet in 1988 were handed over so they could be flown to the Netherlands for trial. 270 people were killed in the bombing.
1999 – In Laramie, WY, Russell Henderson pled guilty to kidnapping and felony murder in the death of Matthew Shepard. https://www.deseret.com/1999/4/5/19438456/man-enters-guilty-plea-in-gay-student-s-death
2009 – North Korea launches its controversial Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2 rocket. The satellite passed over mainland Japan, which prompted an immediate reaction from the United Nations Security Council, as well as participating states of Six-party talks
2012 – International internet group Anonymous hack several Chinese bureaus in opposition to censorship
2016 – San Francisco becomes the first US city to mandate paid parental leave
2016 – PayPal announces it is cancelling a $3.6 million investment in North Carolina after the state passes anti-gay legislation
2020 – British monarch Queen Elizabeth II makes an address to the nation “we will meet again”, for only the 5th time in her 66-year reign
2021 – Italy scraps its 1914 film censorship law that could ban films on moral and religious grounds
2063 – Earth’s 1st contact with the extraterrestrial Vulcan species in the Star Trek universe
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
