Today in History

1497		John Cabot returns to England after his first successful journey to the Labrador coast.
1863		The CSS Alabama captures the USS Sea Bride near the Cape of Good Hope.
1888		Martha Turner is murdered by an unknown assailant, believed to be Jack the Ripper, in London, England.
1890		William Kemmler becomes the first man to be executed by the electric chair.
1904		The Japanese army in Korea surrounds a Russian army retreating to Manchuria.
1914		Ellen Louise Wilson, the first wife of the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, dies of Barite's disease.
1927		A Massachusetts high court hears the final plea from Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italians convicted of murder.
1942		The Soviet city of Voronezh falls to the German army.
1945		Paul Tibbets, the commander of Enola Gay, drops the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.It was the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, that induced the Japanese to surrender.
1965		President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, outlawing the literacy test for voting eligibility in the South