1492 – Christopher Columbus signed a contract with Spain to find a passage to Asia and the Indies.

1521 – Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.

1524 – New York Harbor was discovered by Giovanni Verrazano.

1535 – Antonio Mendoza was appointed first viceroy of New Spain.

1629 – Horses were first imported into the colonies by the American Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1704 – John Campbell published what would eventually become the first successful American newspaper. It was known as the Boston “News-Letter.”

1758 – Frances Williams published a collection of Latin poems. He was the first African-American to graduate from a college in the western hemisphere.

1808 – Bayonne Decree by Napoleon I of France ordered the seizure of U.S. ships.

1810 – Pineapple cheese was patented by Lewis M. Norton.

1824 – Russia abandoned all North American claims south of 54′ 40′.

1860 – New Yorkers learned of a new law that required fire escapes to be provided for tenement houses.

1861 – Virginia became the eighth state to secede from the Union.

1864 – U.S. Civil War General Grant banned the trading of prisoners.

1865 – Mary Surratt was arrested as a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination.

1875 – The game “snooker” was invented by Sir Neville Chamberlain.

1895 – China and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki. It was the end of the first Sino-Japanese War. In the treaty China ceded Taiwan to Japan.

1916 – The American Academy of Arts and Letters obtained a charter from the U.S. Congress.

1917 – A bill in Congress to establish Daylight Saving Time was defeated. It was passed a couple of months later.

1935 – “Lights Out” debuted on NBC Radio. It ran until 1952.

1941 – Igor Sikorsky accomplished the first successful helicopter lift-off from water near Stratford, CT.

1941 – The office of Price Administration was established in the U.S. to handle rationing.

1946 – The last French troops left Syria.

1947 – Jackie Robinson (Brooklyn Dodgers) performed a bunt for his first major league hit.

1961 – About 1,400 U.S.-supported Cuban exiles invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. It was an unsuccessful attack.

1964 – Jerrie Mock became first woman to fly an airplane solo around the world.

1964 – The Ford Motor Company unveiled its new Mustang model.

1967 – “The Joey Bishop Show” debuted on ABC-TV.

1967 – The U.S. Supreme Court barred Muhammad Ali’s request to be blocked from induction into the U.S. Army.

1969 – In Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of assassinating U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

1969 – Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubcek was deposed.

1970 – Apollo 13 returned to Earth safely after an on-board accident with an oxygen tank.

1975 – Khmer Rouge forces capture the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. It was the end of the five-year war.

1983 – In Warsaw, police routed 1,000 Solidarity supporters.

1983 – In New York, a transit strike that began on March 7 ended.

19840 – In London, demonstrators outside the Libyan Embassy were fired upon from someone inside. Eleven people were injured and an English Police woman was killed.

1985 – The U.S. Postal Service unveiled its new 22-cent, “LOVE” stamp.

1985 – In Lebanon, the cabinet resigned as Shiites took W. Beirut.

1987 – In Sri Lanka, Tamil guerrillas killed 122 people in a road ambush.

1989 – In Poland, courts gave Solidarity legal status.

1993 – A federal jury in Los Angeles convicted two former police officers of violating the civil rights of beaten motorist Rodney King. Two other officers were acquitted.

1996 – Erik and Lyle Menendez were sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing their parents.

1999 – In India, the government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee collapsed after losing a vote of confidence.

2002 – At the National Maritime Museum in London, the exhibit “Skin Deep – A History of Tattooing” opened.

on-this-day.com

On April 16, 1963, days after being jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, for a series of anti-segregation protests, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pens a response to his critics on some scraps of paper. This open letter, now known as his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” offered a forceful defense of the protest campaign. It is now regarded as one of the greatest texts of the American civil rights movement.

On April 16, 1963, days after being jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, for a series of anti-segregation protests, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pens a response to his critics on some scraps of paper. This open letter, now known as his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” offered a forceful defense of the protest campaign. It is now regarded as one of the greatest texts of the American civil rights movement.

for the complete article: history.com

Lit Hub Daily

April 14

In 1952, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is published by Random House.

Source: lithub.com

1775 – The first abolitionist society in U.S. was organized in Philadelphia with Ben Franklin as president.

1793 – A royalist rebellion in Santo Domingo was crushed by French republican troops.

1828 – The first edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary was published under the name “American Dictionary of the English Language.”

1860 – The first Pony Express rider arrived in San Francisco with mail originating in St. Joseph, MO.

1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. He actually died early the next morning.

1889 – The first international Conference of American States began in Washington, DC.

1894 – First public showing of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope took place.

1902 – James Cash (J.C.) Penney opened his first retail store in Kemmerer, WY. It was called the Golden Rule Store.

1910 – U.S. President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball for the Washington Senators and the Philadelphia Athletics.

1912 – The Atlantic passenger liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage hit an iceberg and began to sink. 1,517 people lost their lives and more than 700 survived.

1918 – The U.S. First Aero Squadron engaged in America’s first aerial dogfight with enemy aircraft over Toul, France.

1925 – WGN became the first radio station to broadcast a regular season major league baseball game. The Cubs beat the Pirates 8-2.

1931 – King Alfonso XIII of Spain went into exile and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed.

1939 – The John Steinbeck novel “The Grapes of Wrath” was first published.

1946 – The civil war between Communists and nationalist resumed in China.

1953 – Viet Minh invaded Laos with 40,00 troops.

1956 – Ampex Corporation of Redwood City, CA, demonstrated the first commercial magnetic tape recorder for sound and picture.

1959 – The Taft Memorial Bell Tower was dedicated in Washington, DC.

1969 – For the first time, a major league baseball game was played in Montreal, Canada.

1981 – America’s first space shuttle, Columbia, returned to Earth after a three-day test flight. The shuttle orbited the Earth 36 times during the mission.

1984 – The Texas Board of Education began requiring that the state’s public school textbooks describe the evolution of human beings as “theory rather than fact”.

1985 – The Russian paper “Pravda” called U.S. President Reagan‘s planned visit to Bitburg to visit the Nazi cemetery an “act of blasphemy”.

1986 – U.S. President Reagan announced the U.S. air raid on military and terrorist related targets in Libya.

1987 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed banning all missiles from Europe.

1988 – Representatives from the U.S.S.R., Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S. signed an agreement that called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan starting on May 15. The last Soviet troop left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989.

1988 – In New York, real estate tycoons Harry and Leona Helmsley were indicted for income tax evasion.

1990 – Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles began a streak of 95 errorless games and 431 total chances by a shortstop.

1994 – Two American F-15 warplanes inadvertently shot down two U.S. helicopters over northern Iraq. 26 people were killed including 15 Americans.

1998 – The state of Virginia ignored the requests from the World Court and executed a Paraguayan for the murder of a U.S. woman.

1999 – Pakistan test-fired a ballistic missile that was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching its rival neighbor India.

2000 – After five years of deadlock, Russia approved the START II treaty that calls for the scrapping of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads. The Russian government warned it would abandon all arms-control pacts if Washington continued with an anti-missile system.

2002 – U.S. President George W. Bush sent a letter of congratulations to JCPenny’s associates for being in business for 100 years. James Cash (J.C.) Penney had opened his first retail store on April 14, 1902.

2002 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to office two days after being arrested by his country’s military.

2008 – Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines announced they were combining.

Source:

on-this-day.com

Pennsylvania Society for Promoting

the Abolition of Slavery

In his later years, Benjamin Franklin became vocal as an abolitionist and in 1787 began to serve as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. This Constitution was enacted by Franklin just one month before he would join the Constitutional Convention of 1787 held in Philadelphia.

The Society was originally formed April 14, 1775, in Philadelphia, as The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage; it was reorganized April 16 in 1784, and, in 1787, it enacted this constitution which appeared in print for the first time in this Philadelphia Magazine while the delegates were all assembled at the Constitutional Convention. The Society not only advocated the abolition of slavery, but made efforts to integrate freed slaves into American society.

For the complete article:

source: benjaminfranklin.org