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.

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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. April 17

Three months after the state jury acquitted the four Los Angeles police officers, a Federal grand jury indicted the same four men on Federal charges of violating Mr. King’s civil rights. Rodney King Testifies on Beating: ‘I Was Just Trying to Stay Alive’ (March 10, 1993) Rodney King testified in the federal civil rights trial against the officers.

nytimes.com

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source: youtube

0069 – Otho committed suicide after being defeated by Vitellius’ troops at Bedriacum.

0556 – Pelagius I began his reign as Catholic Pope.

1065 – The Norman Robert Guiscard took Bari. Five centuries of Byzantine rule in southern Italy ended.

1175 – Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, signed the Treaty of Montebello with the Lombard League.

1705 – Queen Anne of England knighted Isaac Newton.

1746 – The Duke of Cumberland defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie (and his Jacobites) at the battle of Culloden.

1818 – The U.S. Senate ratified Rush-Bagot amendment to form an unarmed U.S.-Canada border.

1851 – A lighthouse was swept away in a gale at Minot’s Ledge, MA.

1854 – San Salvador was destroyed by an earthquake.

1862 – Confederate President Jefferson Davis approved conscription act for white males between 18 and 35.

1862 – In the U.S., slavery was abolished by law in the District of Columbia.

1883 – Paul Kruger became president of the South African Republic.

1900 – The first book of postage stamps was issued. The two-cent stamps were available in books of 12, 24 and 48 stamps.

1905 – Andrew Carnegie donated $10,000,000 of personal money to set up the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

1912 – Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel.

1917 – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returned to Russia to start Bolshevik Revolution after years of exile.

1922 – Annie Oakley shot 100 clay targets in a row, to set a women’s record.

1922 – The Soviet Union and Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo under which Germany recognized the Soviet Union and diplomatic and trade relations were restored.

1935 – “Fibber McGee and Molly” premiered.

1940 – The first no-hit, no-run game to be thrown on an opening day of the major league baseball season was earned by Bob Feller. The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox 1-0.

1942 – The Island of Malta was awarded the George Cross in recognition for heroism under constant German air attack.

1943 – In Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hoffman accidently discovered the the hallucinogenic effects of LSD-25 while working on the medicinal value of lysergic acid.

1944 – The destroyer USS Laffey survived immense damage from attacks by 22 Japanese aircraft off Okinawa.

1945 – American troops entered Nuremberg, Germany.

1947 – The Zoomar lens, invented by Dr. Frank Back, was demonstrated in New York City. It was the first lens to exhibit zooming effects.

1947 – In Texas City, TX, the French ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer, caught fire and blew up. The explosions and resulting fires killed 576 people.

1948 – In Paris, the Organization for European Economic Co-operation was set up.

1951 – 75 people were killed when the British submarine Affray sank in the English Channel.

1953 – The British royal yacht Britannia was launched.

1962 – Walter Cronkite began anchoring “The CBS Evening News”.

1967 – At the Western Open in El Monte, CA, Ken Barnes Jr. became the first skeet shooter to break a perfect 400 x 400 in all four guns (.410, 28, 20, and 12 gauges). He is also the only shooter to do this with pump action guns.

1968 – The Pentagon announced that troops would begin coming home from Vietnam.

1968 – Major league baseball’s longest night game was played when the Houston Astros defeated the New York Mets 1-0. The 24 innings took six hours, six minutes to play.

1972 – Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon. It was the fifth manned moon landing.

1972 – Two giants pandas arrived in the U.S. from China.

1975 – The Khmer Rouge Rebels won control of Cambodia after a five years of civil war. They renamed the country Kampuchea and began a reign of terror.

1978 – In Orissa, India, 180 people died when a tornado hit.

1982 – Queen Elizabeth proclaimed Canada’s new constitution in effect. The act severed the last colonial links with Britain.

1983 – China shelled the Vietnam border in retaliation for raids.

1983 – Brazil detained four Libyan planes en route to Nicaragua after finding weapons, explosives and ammunition on the planes.

1985 – Mickey Mantle was reinstated after being banned from baseball for several years.

1987 – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sternly warned U.S. radio stations to watch the use of indecent language on the airwaves.

1987 – The U.S. Patent Office began allowing the patenting of new animals created by genetic engineering.

1992 – Italian financier Carlo de Benedetti and 32 others were convicted of fraud in connection with the 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.

1992 – The House ethics committee listed 303 current and former lawmakers who had overdrawn their House bank accounts.

1995 – The European Union and Canada agreed to protect threatened fish stocks in the north Atlantic.

1996 – Britain’s Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah, the Duchess of York, announced that they were in the process of getting a divorce.

1996 – An Italian court found former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi guilty on charges of corruption. He was sentenced to eight years and three months in prison.

1999 – Wayne Gretzky announced his retirement from the National Hockey League (NHL).

2002 – The U.S. Supreme Court overturned major parts of a 1996 child pornography law based on rights to free speech.

2007 – In Blacksburg, VA, a student killed 33 people at Virginia Tech before killing himself

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