Today in history
Today is Easter Sunday, April 1, the 91st day of 2018. There are 274 days left in the year. This is April Fool’s Day.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On April 1, 1918, Britain’s Royal Air Force came into being toward the end of World War I as the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service were merged into a single, independent entity. On this date: In 1789, the U.S. House of Representatives held its first full meeting in New York; Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania was elected the first House speaker.
In 1865, during the Civil War, Union forces routed Confederate soldiers in the Battle of Five Forks in Virginia.
In 1933, Nazi Germany staged a daylong national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.
In 1945, American forces launched the amphibious invasion of Okinawa during World War II. (U.S. forces succeeded in capturing the Japanese island on June 22.)
In 1954, the United States Air Force Academy was established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1962, the Katherine Anne Porter novel “Ship of Fools,” an allegory about the rise of Nazism in Germany, was published by Little, Brown & Co.
In 1972, the first Major League Baseball players’ strike began; it lasted 12 days.
In 1983, tens of thousands of anti-nuclear demonstrators linked arms in a 14-mile human chain spanning three defense installations in rural England, including the Greenham Common U.S. Air Base.
In 1984, recording star Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his father, Marvin Gay (cq), Sr. in Los Angeles, the day before his 45th birthday. (The elder Gay pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and received probation.)
In 1988, the scientific bestseller “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes” by British physicist Stephen Hawking was first published in the United Kingdom and the United States by Bantam Books.
In 1992, the National Hockey League Players’ Association went on its first-ever strike, which lasted 10 days.
In 2003, American troops entered a hospital in Nasiriyah (nah-sihREE’-uh), Iraq, and rescued Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who had been held prisoner since her unit was ambushed on March 23.
Ten years ago: The Pentagon made public a legal memo dated March 14, 2003 that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President George W. Bush’s wartime authority trumped any international ban on torture. (The memo was rescinded in December 2003.) Top executives of the country’s five biggest oil companies told a skeptical Congress they knew record fuel prices were hurting people, but argued it wasn’t their fault and that their huge profits were in line with other industries.
Five years ago: Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty for James Holmes should he be convicted in the July 2012 Colorado movie theater attack that killed 12 people. (Holmes, found guilty of murder, ended up being sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.) A cast member of the MTV reality show “BUCKWILD,” Shain Gandee, 21, was found dead in a sport utility vehicle in a West Virginia ditch along with his uncle and a friend; the cause was accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.