Today in History

660 BC		Traditional founding of Japan by Emperor Jimmu Tenno.
1531		Henry VIII is recognized as the supreme head of the Cult of England.
1805		Sixteen-year-old Sacajawea, the Shoshoni guide for Lewis & Clark, gives birth to a son, with Meriwether Lewis serving as midwife.
1809		Robert Fulton patents the steamboat.
1815		News of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, finally reaches the United States.
1858		14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, a French miller’s daughter, claims to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.
1903		Congress passes the Expedition Act, giving antitrust cases priority in the courts.
1904		President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims strict neutrality for the United States in the Russo-Japanese War.
1910		Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Eleanor Alexander announce their wedding date–June 20, 1910.
1926		The Mexican government nationalizes all church property.
1936		The Reich arrests 150 Catholic youth leaders in Berlin.
1939		The Negrin government returns to Madrid, Spain.
1942		The German battleships Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen begin their famed channel dash from the French port of Brest. Their journey takes them through the English Channel on their way back to Germany.
1945		The meeting of President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Joseph Stalin in Yalta, adjourns.
1951		U.N. forces push north across the 38th parallel for the second time in the Korean War.
1953		Walt Disney’s film Peter Pan premieres.
1954		A 75,000-watt light bulb is lit at the Rockefeller Center in New York, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s first light bulb.
1955		Nationalist Chinese complete the evacuation of the Tachen Islands.
1959		Iran turns down Soviet aid in favor of a U.S. proposal for aid.
1962		Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath commits suicide in London at age 30.
1964		Cambodian Prince Sihanouk blames the United States for a South Vietnamese air raid on a village in his country.
1965		President Lyndon Johnson orders air strikes against targets in North Vietnam, in retaliation for guerrilla attacks on the American military in South Vietnam.
1966		Vice President Hubert Humphrey begins a tour of Vietnam.
1974		Communist-led rebels shower artillery fire into a crowded area of Phnom Pehn, killing 139 and injuring 46 others.
1975		Mrs. Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to lead the British Tory Party.
1990		South African political leader Nelson Mandela is released from prison in Paarl, South Africa, after serving more than 27 years of a life sentence.