TODAY IN HISTORY

TUESDAY APR 5, 2022 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.

1614

Indian Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas married Englishman John Rolfe, a widower, in the Virginia Colony.

1621

The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts on a monthlong return trip to England.

1764

Britain’s Parliament passed The American Revenue Act of 1764, also known as the Sugar Act.

1887

In Tuscumbia, Alabama, 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.

1976

Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes died in Houston at age 70.

1986

Two American servicemen and a Turkish woman were killed in the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, an incident that prompted a U.S. air raid on Libya more than a week later.

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.

1991

Former Sen. John Tower, R-texas, his daughter Marian and 21 other people were killed in a commuter plane crash near Brunswick, Georgia.

2008

Actor Charlton Heston, big-screen hero and later leader of the National Rifle Association, died in Beverly Hills, California, at age 84.

2010

An explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine near Charleston, West Virginia, killed 29workers. 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.

2016

Uconn won an unprecedented fourth straight women’s national championship, capping another perfect season by routing Syracuse 82-51.