Today in history

Today is Tuesday, April 7, the 98th day of 2020. There are 268 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On April 7, 1862, Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.

On this date:

In 1798, the Mississippi Territory was created by an act of Congress, with Natchez as the capital.

In 1915, jazz singer-songwriter Billie Holiday, also known as “Lady Day,” was born in Philadelphia.

In 1927, the image and voice of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover were transmitted live from Washington to New York in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television.

In 1947, auto pioneer Henry Ford died in Dearborn, Michigan, at age 83.

In 1953, the U.N. General Assembly ratified Dag Hammarskjold (dahg HAWM’ahr-shoold) of Sweden as the new secretary-general, succeeding Trygve Lie (TRIHG’-vuh lee) of Norway.

In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower held a news conference in which he spoke of the importance of containing the spread of communism in Indochina, saying, “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” (This became known as the “domino theory,” although Eisenhower did not use that term.)

In 1962, nearly 1,200 Cuban exiles tried by Cuba for their roles in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion were convicted of treason.

In 1964, IBM introduced its System/360, the company’s first line of compatible mainframe computers that gave customers the option of upgrading from lowercost models to more powerful ones.

In 1966, the U.S. Navy recovered a hydrogen bomb that the U.S. Air Force had lost in the Mediterranean Sea off Spain following a B-52 crash.

In 1983, space shuttle astronauts Story Musgrave and Don Peterson went on the first U.S. spacewalk in almost a decade as they worked in the open cargo bay of Challenger for nearly four hours.

In 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda, a day after a mysterious plane crash claimed the lives of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi; in the months that followed, hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by Hutu extremists.