ON APRIL 7 ...

In 1770, poet William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, England.

In 1860 W.K. Kellogg, industrialist and founder of the W.K. Kellogg Co., was born in Battle Creek, Mich.

In 1862 Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.

In 1915 jazz and blues vocalist Billie Holiday was born in Baltimore.

In 1927 an audience in New York saw an image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television.

In 1947 auto pioneer Henry Ford died in Dearborn, Mich.; he was 83.

In 1957 the last of New York’s electric trolleys completed its final run from Queens to Manhattan.

In 1969 the Supreme Court unanimously struck down laws prohibiting private possession of obscene material.

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

In 1987 Harold Washington won a second mayoral term handily, making him the first Chicago mayor since the late Richard J. Daley to win re-election.

In 1990 a display of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs opened at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, the same day the center and its director were indicted on obscenity charges. (Both were acquitted.)

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 intellectuals were slaughtered.

In 1999 NATO stepped up its airstrikes in Yugoslavia after rejecting President Slobodan Milosevic’s cease-fire declaration. Yugoslav authorities, meanwhile, closed the main exit route where a quarter-million ethnic Albanians had fled Kosovo.

In 2000 Attorney General Janet Reno met in Washington with the father of Elian Gonzalez; Reno later told reporters that officials would arrange for Juan Miguel Gonzalez to reclaim his son, but she gave Elian’s Miami relatives one more chance to drop their resistance and join in a peaceful transfer.

In 2001 an unarmed black man wanted on 14 misdemeanor warrants was fatally shot by a white police officer in Cincinnati, sparking three days of riots. Also in 2001 NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft took off on a 6-month, 286 million-mile journey to the Red Planet.

In 2003 U.S. troops in more than 100 U.S. armored vehicles rumbled through downtown Baghdad, seizing one of Saddam Hussein’s opulent palaces and toppling a 40-foot statue of the Iraqi ruler.

In 2004 Mounir el Motassadeq, the only Sept. 11 suspect ever convicted, was freed after a Hamburg, Germany, court ruled that the evidence was too weak to hold him pending a retrial.

In 2005 Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, was named Iraq’s interim prime minister; Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was sworn in as interim president. Also in 2005 the painkiller Bextra is taken off the market.

In 2008 the Chicago Tribune won a Pulitzer prize for articles that examined some Chinese-made toys that have proven dangerous to children, and the lax federal oversight that failed to address the issue in a timely way.

In 2012 Mike Wallace, “60 Minutes” pioneer and veteran newsman known for asking the tough questions, died; he was 93. Wallace worked as a radio news reporter at the Chicago Sun newspaper and WMAQ radio, and worked for WGN radio.