TODAY IN HISTORY

1776: North Carolina’s Fourth Provincial Congress authorized the colony’s delegates to the Continental Congress to support independence from Britain. 1861: The Civil War began as Confederate forces

opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. 1912: Clara Barton, the founder of the American

Red Cross, died in Glen Echo, Md., at age 90. 1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga., at age 63; he was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman.

1954: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission opened a hearing on whether Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, should have his security clearance reinstated amid questions about his loyalty (it wasn’t). Bill Haley and His Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock” in New York for Decca Records.

1955: The Salk vaccine against polio was declared safe and effective.

1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in space, orbiting the Earth once before making a safe landing.

1963: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Ala., charged with contempt of court and parading without a permit. (During his time behind bars, King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”)

1981: The space shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral on its first test flight. Former world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, 66, died in Las Vegas.

1988: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent to Harvard University for a genetically engineered mouse, the first time a patent was granted for an animal life-form.

1990: In its first meeting, East Germany’s first democratically elected parliament acknowledged responsibility for the Nazi Holocaust, and asked the forgiveness of Jews and others who had suffered. 2006: Jurors in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial listened to a recording of shouts and cries in the cockpit as desperate passengers twice charged hijackers during the final half-hour of doomed United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.

2009: American cargo ship captain Richard Phillips was rescued from Somali pirates by U.S. Navy snipers who shot and killed three of the hostage-takers.