421 – The Italian city of Venice was founded with the dedication of the first church, that of San Giacomo di Rialto, on the islet of Rialto.
1306 – Robert the Bruce became King of Scots (Scotland).
1519 – Hernando Cortes, entered the province of Tabasco and defeated Tabascan Indians.
1584 – Sir Walter Raleigh was granted a patent to colonize Virginia.
1655 – Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, was discovered by Christiaan Huygens.
1807 – The Swansea and Mumbles Railway in Wales, UK, then known as the Oystermouth Railway, became the first passenger-carrying railway in the world.
1865 – American Civil War: In Virginia, Confederate forces temporarily captured Fort Stedman from the Union.
1894 – Coxey’s Army, the first significant American protest march, departed Massillon, Ohio for Washington, D.C. Coxey’s Army was a protest march by unemployed workers in the second year of a four-year economic depression that was the worst in United States history at the time.
1911 – In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers.
1931 – The Scottsboro Boys were arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.
1943 – Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore premiered on radio.
1947 – An explosion in a coal mine in Centralia, Illinois killed 111 people.
1948 – The first successful tornado forecast predicted that a tornado would strike Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.
1954 – RCA manufactured its first color TV set (12½” screen at $1,000).
1957 – United States Customs seized copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” on obscenity grounds.
1959 – Chain Island was sold by the State of California to Russell Gallaway III, a Sacramento businessman who planned to use it as a “hunting and fishing retreat”, for $5,258.20.
1961 – Elvis Presley performed live on the USS Arizona.
1961 – Third place game was one of the wildest contests in NCAA Tournament history as St Joseph’s defeats Utah, 127-120 in quadruple overtime.
1965 – Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. successfully completed their 4-day 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.
1966 – The Beatles posed for photographer Robert Whitaker with mutilated dolls and butchered meat for the album cover of “Yesterday & Today.” It is later pulled from circulation and replaced with a different photo.
1967 -The Turtle’s “Happy Together” reached #1.
1967 – The Who and Cream made their US debut at Murray the K’s Easter Show.
1971 – The Army of the Republic of Vietnam abandoned an attempt to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos.
1972 – America’s LP “America” reached #1.
1975 – Linda Ronstadt released her cover of the Everly Brothers’ 1960 song “When Will I Be Loved” as a single. It reached No. 2 in the charts.
1979 – The first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, was delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.
1982 – The first broadcast of “Cagney & Lacey”, starring Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly, on CBS.
1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world’s first wiki, and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, was made public by Ward Cunningham.
2006 – Capitol Hill massacre: A gunman killed six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
