Today in History

Today in History

1204 The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople.

1606 England adopts the Union Jack as its flag.

1770 Parliament repeals the Townsend Acts.

1782 The British navy wins its only naval engagement against the colonists in the American Revolution at the Battle of Saints, off Dominica.

1811 The first colonists arrive at Cape Disappointment, Washington.

1861 Fort Sumter is shelled by the Confederacy, starting America’s Civil War.

1864 Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest captures Fort Pillow, in Tennessee.

1877 The first catcher’s mask is used in a baseball game.

1911 Pierre Prier completes the first non-stop London-Paris flight in three hours and 56 minutes.

1916 American cavalrymen and Mexican bandit troops clash at Parral, Mexico.

1927 The British Cabinet comes out in favor of voting rights for women.

1944 The U.S. Twentieth Air Force is activated to begin the strategic bombing of Japan.

1945 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies at Warm Spring, Georgia. Harry S. Truman becomes president.

1954 Bill Haley records “Rock Around the Clock.”

1955 Dr. Jonas Salk’s discovery of a polio vaccine is announced.

1961 Soviet Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin becomes first man to orbit the Earth.

1963 Police use dogs and cattle prods on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.

1966 Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American major league umpire.

1983 Harold Washington is elected the first black mayor of Chicago.

Born

1777 Henry Clay, the “Great Compromiser”, American politician and statesman who ran unsuccessfully for president three times.

1791 Francis Preston Blair, Washington Globe newspaper editor.

1838 John Shaw Billings, American librarian, army physician.

1949 Scott Turow, writer and attorney.

History