1603 – Queen Elizabeth I died, and King James VI of Scotland ascended to the throne, uniting England and Scotland under a single British monarch.
1792 – Artist Benjamin West became the first American artist to be selected president of the Royal Academy of London.
1874 – Harry Houdini was born in Appleton, WI.
1882 – Professor Robert Koch announced the discovery of the tuberculosis germ in Berlin, Germany.
1932 – Singer Belle Baker hosted a radio variety show on WABC in New York City from a moving train – a first for radio broadcasting.
1949 – President Harry Truman authorized a U.S. resolution for $16 million in aid to Palestinian refugees displaced by Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
1955 – The Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, opened on Broadway, ultimately running for 694 shows and winning the Critics’ Circle Award as the Best American Play.
1958 – Elvis Presley reported to draft board 86 in Memphis, TN, to begin a 2-year stint in the U.S. Army.
1960 – A U.S. appeals court ruled that D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, was not obscene and could be sent through the mail.
1980 – Capitol Records released some rare Beatles tracks, including stereo versions of Penny Lane and She Loves You, sung by the group in German, under the title, Sie Liebt Dich.
1989 – The Exxon Valdez, a 987-foot supertanker loaded with 1,264,155 barrels of North Slope crude oil, ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling 11.2 million gallons of oil into the sea and damaging nearly five hundred miles of shoreline.
1999 – NATO began air strikes against Yugoslavia with the bombing of Serbian military positions in Kosovo.
2002 – Halle Berry became the first African-American woman to win the Best Actress Oscar. Denzel Washington won the Best Actor award, marking the first time African-Americans had won the year’s top acting awards.
Chief Writing Wolf 