TODAY IN WORLD HISTORY
Today is Saturday, April 29, the 119th day of 2017. There are 246 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History On April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, California, acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of almost all state charges in the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King; the verdicts were followed by several days of rioting in Los Angeles resulting in 55 deaths.
On this date • In 1429, Joan of Arc entered the besieged city of Orleans to lead a French victory over the English.
• In 1861, the Maryland House of Delegates voted 53-13 against seceding from the Union. In Montgomery, Alabama, President Jefferson Davis asked the Confederate Congress for the authority to wage war.
• In 1945, during World War II, American soldiers liberated the Dachau (DAH’-khow) concentration camp. Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun inside his “Fuhrerbunker” and designated Adm. Karl Doenitz (DUHR’-nihtz) president.
• In 1977, Pope Paul VI and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, participated in a Christian unity service in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.
• In 1987, Ronnie DeSillers, a 7year-old liver recipient whose story had prompted thousands of Americans, including President Ronald Reagan, to lend support, died at a Pittsburgh hospital while awaiting a fourth transplant.
• In 2011, Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton were married in an opulent ceremony at London’s Westminster Abbey.
On April 30 • In 1517, Londoners began attacking foreign residents in rioting that carried over into the next day; no deaths were reported from what came to be known as “Evil May Day,” but about a dozen rioters, maybe more, ended up being executed.
• In 1789, George Washington took the oath of office in New York as the first president of the United States.
• In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France for 60 million francs, the equivalent of about $15 million.
• In 1812, Louisiana became the 18th state of the Union.
• In 1945, as Soviet troops approached his Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler committed suicide along with his wife of one day, Eva Braun.
• In 1975, the Vietnam War ended as the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
• In 1988, Gen. Manuel Noriega, waving a machete, vowed at a rally to keep fighting U.S. efforts to oust him as Panama’s military ruler.
On May 1 • In 1707, the Kingdom of Great Britain was created as a treaty merging England and Scotland took effect.
• In 1786, Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” premiered in Vienna.
• In 1866, three days of race-related rioting erupted in Memphis, Tennessee, as white mobs targeted blacks, 46 of whom were killed, along with two whites. (The violence spurred passage of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining American citizenship and equal protection under the law.)
• In 1915, during World War I, a German submarine torpedoed and severely damaged the SS Gulflight, an American tanker near Britain’s Scilly Isles, even though the United States was still neutral in the conflict.
• In 1941, the Orson Welles motion picture “Citizen Kane” premiered in New York.
• In 1960, the Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane over Sverdlovsk and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.
• In 1992, on the third day of the Los Angeles riots, a visibly shaken Rodney King appeared in public to appeal for calm, pleading, “Can we all get along?”
• In 2011, President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden during a U.S. commando operation (because of the time difference, it was early May 2 in Pakistan, where the al-Qaida leader met his end).