El Dorado News-Times

TODAY IN HISTORY

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Today is Wednesday, April 7, the 97th day of 2021. There are 268 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History: On April 7, 1915, jazz singer-songwriter Billie Holiday, also known as "Lady Day," was born in Philadelph­ia.

On this date:

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

In 1922, the Teapot Dome scandal had its beginnings as Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall signed a secret deal to lease U.S. Navy petroleum reserves in Wyoming and California to his friends, oilmen Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny, in exchange for cash gifts.

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

In 1945, during World War II, American planes intercepte­d and effectivel­y destroyed a Japanese fleet, which included the battleship Yamato, that was headed to Okinawa on a suicide mission.

In 1957, shortly after midnight, the last of New York's electric trolleys completed its final run from Queens to Manhattan.

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 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 1984, the Census Bureau reported Los Angeles had overtaken Chicago as the nation's "second city" in terms of population.

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.

In 2010, North Korea said it had convicted and sentenced an American man to eight years in a labor prison for entering the country illegally and unspecifie­d hostile acts. (Aijalon Mahli Gomes was freed in August 2010 after former U.S. President Jimmy Carter secured his release.)

In 2015, Michael Thomas Slager, a white South Carolina police officer, was charged with murder in the shooting death of Black motorist Walter Lamer Scott after law enforcemen­t officials saw a cellphone video taken by a bystander. (Slager pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison; prosecutor­s agreed to drop state murder charges that remained after a jury couldn't agree whether he had committed a crime.)

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