Today in History:
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.
1962 – The U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution that condemned South Africa's racist apartheid policies. The resolution also called for all members 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.
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.
1984 – For the first time in 193 years, the New York Stock Exchange remained open during a presidential election day.
1985 – Leftist guerrillas belonging to Columbia's April 19 Movement seized control of the Palace of Justice in Bogota.
1986 – Former Navy radioman John A. Walker Jr., was sentenced in Baltimore to life imprisonment. Walker had admitted to being the head of a family spy ring.
1986 – U.S. intelligence sources confirmed a story run by the Lebanese magazine Ash Shiraa that reported the U.S. had been secretly selling arms to Iran in an effort to secure the release of seven American hostages.
