TODAY IN HISTORY

On April 4, 1818, Congress decided the U.S. flag would consist of 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star added for every new state of the Union.

In 1841, President William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia one month after his inaugural, becoming the first U.S. chief executive to die in office.

In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by his son Tad, visited the vanquished Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, where he was greeted by a crowd that included former slaves.

In 1917, the U.S. Senate voted 82-6 in favor of declaring war against Germany.

In 1933, the Navy airship USS Akron crashed in severe weather off the New Jersey coast with the loss of 73 lives.

In 1945, during World War II, U.S. forces liberated the Nazi concentration camp Ohrdruf in Germany.

In 1949, 12 nations, including the U.S. nited States, signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, D.C.

In 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot and killed while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

In 1975 more than 130 people, most of them children, were killed when a U.S. Air Force transport plane evacuating Vietnamese orphans crashed shortly after take-off from Saigon.

In 1981 Henry Cisneros became the first Mexican-American elected mayor of a major U.S. city — San Antonio.

In 1983 the space shuttle Challenger roared into orbit on its maiden voyage.

In 1985 Gary Dotson, who served six years of a prison sentence for rape, was freed on bail from Joliet Correctional Center after his accuser, Cathleen Crowell Webb, testified that the attack had never occurred.

In 1991 Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., and six other people, including two children, were killed when a helicopter collided with Heinz’s plane over a schoolyard in Merion, Pa.

In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed legislation severing the link between crop prices and government subsidies.

In 2003 Sammy Sosa of the Cubs became the 18th player to hit 500 career homers, connecting for a solo shot in a 10-9 loss to Cincinnati.

In 2017 at least 86 people in the northwestern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun were killed in a chemical attack ordered by President Bashar Assad that left hundreds choking or foaming at the mouth; two days later President Donald Trump retaliated with a missile barrage on a Syrian air base.