TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY is Thursday, April 3, 2014. On this day:

1860 - The first Pony Express riders left St. Joseph, MO and Sacramento, CA. The trip across country took about 10 days. The Pony Express only lasted about a year and a half.

1866 - Rudolph Eickemeyer and G. Osterheld patented a blocking and shaping machine for hats.

1882 - The outlaw Jesse James was shot in the back and killed by Robert Ford for a $5,000 reward. There was later controversy over whether it was actually Jesse James that had been killed.

1936 - Richard Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and death of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

1942 - The Japanese began their all-out assault on the U.S. and Filipino troops at Bataan.

1946 - Lt. General Masaharu Homma, the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, was executed in the Philippines.

1948 - U.S. President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan to revive war-torn Europe. It was $5 billion in aid for 16 countries.

1949 - Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis debuted on radio on the “Martin and Lewis Show”. The NBC program ran until 1952.

1967 - The U.S. State Department said that Hanoi might be brainwashing American prisoners.

1968 - Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “mountaintop” speech just 24 hours before he was assassinated.

1968 - North Vietnam agreed to meet with U.S. representatives to set up preliminary peace talks.

1983 - It was reported that Vietnamese occupation forces had overrun a key insurgent base in western Cambodia.

1984 - Sikh terrorists killed a member of the Indian Parliament in his home.

1984 - Col. Lansana Konte became the new president of Guinea when the armed forces seized power after the death of Sekou Toure.