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.

by history.com

   Photo by Jeff Peterson, Deseret News

On this day in 1700, English pranksters began popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other.

Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery.

Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes. These included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.

Historians have also linked April Fools’ Day to ancient festivals such as Hilaria, which was celebrated in Rome at the end of March and involved people dressing up in disguises. There’s also speculation that April Fools’ Day was tied to the vernal equinox, or first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, when Mother Nature fooled people with changing, unpredictable weather.

April Fools’ Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool) and followed by Tailie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on them. In modern times, people have gone to great lengths to create elaborate April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Newspapers, radio and TV stations, and Web sites have participated in the April 1 tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have fooled their audiences.

In 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees; numerous viewers were fooled.

In 1985, Sports Illustrated tricked many of its readers when it ran a made-up article about a rookie pitcher named Sidd Finch who could throw a fastball over 168 miles per hour.

In 1996, Taco Bell, the fast-food restaurant chain, duped people when it announced it had agreed to purchase Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, after Burger King advertised a “Left-Handed Whopper,” scores of clueless customers requested the fake sandwich.