This day in history
Today is Friday, April 5, the 96th day of 2024. There are 270 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Movie producer Roger Corman is 98. Country singer Tommy Cash is 84. Actor Michael Moriarty is 83. Pop singer Allan Clarke (The Hollies) is
82. Writer-director Peter Greenaway is 82. Actor Max Gail is 81. Actor Jane Asher is 78. Singersongwriter Peter Case is 70. Hiphop artist/actor Christopher “Kid” Reid is 60. Rock guitarist Mike McCready of Pearl Jam is
58. Singer Paula Cole is 56. Actor Victoria Hamilton is 53. Rapperproducer Pharrell Williams is
51. Rapper/producer Juicy J is
49. Actor Sterling K. Brown is
48. Country singer-musician Mike Eli of The Eli Young Band is 43. Actor Lily James is 35.
▶ In 1614, Indian Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas married Englishman John Rolfe, a widower, in Virginia Colony.
▶ In 1621, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth Colony on a monthlong return trip to England.
▶ In 1764, Britain’s Parliament passed The American Revenue Act of 1764, also known as the Sugar Act.
▶ In 1887, in Tuscumbia, Ala., teacher Anne Sullivan achieved a breakthrough as her 6-year-old deaf-blind pupil, Helen Keller, learned the meaning of the word “water” as spelled out in the Manual Alphabet.
▶ In 1926, reporter and critic H.L. Mencken was arrested on Boston Common for selling a magazine that had been banned by the New England Watch and Ward Society, the city’s self-appointed moral censors. (He was acquitted but Boston continued to lead the nation in the banning of books for another 30 years.)
▶ In 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death following their conviction in New York on charges of conspiring to commit espionage for the Soviet Union.
▶ In 1986, two American servicemen and a Turkish woman were killed in the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, an incident that prompted a US air raid on Libya more than a week later.
▶ In 1987, Fox Broadcasting Co. made its prime-time TV debut by airing the situation comedy “Married with Children” followed by “The Tracey Ullman Show,” then repeating both premiere episodes two more times in the same evening.
▶ In 1991, former senator John Tower, a Texas Republican, his daughter Marian, and 21 other people were killed in a commuter plane crash near Brunswick, Ga.
▶ In 2010, an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine near Charleston, W.Va, killed 29 workers. In a televised rescue, 115 Chinese coal miners were freed after spending eight days trapped in a flooded mine, surviving an accident that had killed 38.
▶ In 2016, UConn won an unprecedented fourth straight women’s national championship, capping another perfect season by routing Syracuse 8251.
▶ In 2020, Mayor Martin J. Walsh recommended a curfew of 9 p.m. for Boston and the wearing of face masks outdoors as COVID-19 cases skyrocket.
▶ Last year, Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an antivaccine activist and scion of one of the country’s most famous political families, announced he was running for president.