TODAY IN HISTORY

On this day in:

1789 – Father John Carroll was appointed as the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States of America.

1832 – Joseph Smith, III, was born. He was the first president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He was also the son of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.

1851 – Charles Henry Dow was born. He was the founder of Dow Jones & Company.

1860 – Abraham Lincoln was elected to be the sixteenth president of the United States.

1861 – Jefferson Davis was elected as the president of the Confederacy in the U.S.

1861 – The inventor of basketball, James Naismith, was born.

1869 – The first official intercollegiate football game was played in New Brunswick, NJ. 1894 – William C. Hooker received a patent for the mousetrap.

1903 – Philippe Bunau- Varilla, as Panama’s ambassador to the United States, signed the Hay-Bunau- Varilla Treaty. The document granted rights to the United States to build and indefinitely administer the Panama Canal Zone and its defenses.

1913 – Mohandas K. Gandhi was arrested as he led a march of Indian miners in South Africa.

1917 – During World War I, Candian forces take the village of Passchendaele, Belgium, in the Third Battle of Ypres.

1923 – Jacob Schick was granted a patent for the electric shaver.

1935 – Edwin H. Armstrong announced his development of FM broadcasting.

1952 – The first hydrogen bomb was exploded at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

1961 – In the Saraha Desert of Algeria, a natural gas well ignited when a pipe ruptured. The flames rose between 450 feet and 800 feet. The fire burned until April 28, 1962 when a team led by Red Adair used explosives to deprived the fire of oxygen. (Devil’s Cigarette Lighter) 1962 – The U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution that condemned South Africa’s racist apartheid policies. The resolution also called for all member states to terminate military and economic relations with South Africa.

1965 – The Freedom Flights program began which would allow 250,000 Cubans to come to the United States by 1971.

1967 – Phil Donahue began a TV talk show in Dayton, OH. The show was on the air for 29 years.

1973 – NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft began photographing Jupiter.

1975 – King Hassan II of Morocco launches the Green March, a mass migration of 300,000 unarmed Moroccans, that march into the nation of Western Sahara.

1977 – 39 people were killed when an earthen dam burst, sending a wall of water through the campus of Toccoa Falls Bible College in Georgia.

1983 – U.S. Army choppers dropped hundreds of leaflets over northern and central Grenada. The leaflets urged residents to cooperate in locating any Grenadian army or Cuban resisters to the U.S-led invasion.