1513 – Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida. He had sighted the land the day before.

1776 – George Washington received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard College .

1829 – James Carrington patented the coffee mill.

1860 – The first Pony Express riders left St. Joseph, MO and Sacramento, CA. The trip across country took about 10 days. The Pony Express only lasted about a year and a half.

1865 – Union forces occupy Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.

1866 – Rudolph Eickemeyer and G. Osterheld patented a blocking and shaping machine for hats.

1882 – The American outlaw Jesse James was shot in the back and killed by Robert Ford for a $5,000 reward. There was later controversy over whether it was actually Jesse James that had been killed.

1910 – Alaska’s Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America was climbed.

1933 – First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt informed newspaper reporters that beer would be served at the White House. This followed the March 22 legislation that legalized “3.2” beer.

1936 – Richard Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and death of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

1942 – The Japanese began their all-out assault on the U.S. and Filipino troops at Bataan.

1946 – Lt. General Masaharu Homma, the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, was executed in the Philippines.

1948 – U.S. President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan to revive war-torn Europe. It was $5 billion in aid for 16 countries.

1949 – Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis debuted on radio on the “Martin and Lewis Show”. The NBC program ran until 1952.

1953 – “TV Guide” was published for the first time.

1967 – The U.S. State Department said that Hanoi might be brainwashing American prisoners.

1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “mountaintop” speech just 24 hours before he was assassinated.

1968 – North Vietnam agreed to meet with U.S. representatives to set up preliminary peace talks.

1972 – Charlie Chaplin returned to the U.S. after a twenty-year absence.

1979 – Jane Byrne became the first female mayor in Chicago.

1982 – John Chancellor stepped down as anchor of the “The NBC Nightly News.” Roger Mudd and Tom Brokaw became the co-anchors of the show.

1983 – It was reported that Vietnamese occupation forces had overrun a key insurgent base in western Cambodia.

1984 – Sikh terrorists killed a member of the Indian Parliament in his home.

1984 – Col. Lansana Konte became the new president of Guinea when the armed forces seized power after the death of Sekou Toure.

1985 – The U.S. charged that Israel violated the Geneva Convention by deporting Shiite prisoners.

1986 – The U.S. national debt hit $2 trillion.

1987 – Riots disrupted mass during the Pope’s visit to Santiago, Chili.

1993 – The Norman Rockwell Museum opened in Stockbridge, MA.

1996 – An Air Force jetliner carrying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown crashed in Croatia, killing all 35 people aboard.

1996 – Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski was arrested. He pled guilty in January 1998 to five Unabomber attacks in exchange for a life sentence without chance for parole.

1998 – The Dow Jones industrial average climbed above 9,000 for the first time.

2000 – A U.S. federal judge ruled that Microsoft had violated U.S. antitrust laws by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors. Microsoft said that they would appeal the ruling.

2000 – The Nasdaq set a one-day record when it lost 349.15 points to close at 4,233.68.

2010 – The first Apple iPad was released.

Ronald Harmon “Ron” Brown achieved a historic first on 10 February 1989 when he was elected chairman of the Democratic Party – the first African American chosen to lead a major political party in the U.S. Brown came to this position with an impressive set of credentials. A respected and successful lawyer, he worked on Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1980 bid for the presidential nomination, and on Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign.

Despite his experience and qualifications, there was a great deal of opposition to an African American being elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee – as shown in the following three newspaper articles. The first article is a news account of his election, while the other two explore reaction to Brown’s election in Alabama, a state at the heart of the unrest and violence of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Despite these reservations and objections, Brown skillfully played important roles in running the 1992 Democratic National Convention and in Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign that same year. President Clinton nominated Brown to be Secretary of Commerce in 1993 – the first African American to hold that position as well – and it was in that capacity that Brown’s life came to a tragic end when he was killed on 3 April 1996 in a plane crash in Croatia while on a trade mission. He was 54 years old.

For more of this story go to  blog.genealogy