TODAY IN HISTORY

1861: President Abraham Lincoln ordered plans for a relief expedition to sail to South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, which was still in the hands of Union forces despite repeated demands by the Confederacy that it be turned over.

1867: Britain’s Parliament passed, and Queen Victoria signed, the British North America Act creating the Dominion of Canada, which came into being the following July.

1943: World War II rationing of meat, fats and cheese began, limiting consumers to store purchases of an average of about 2 pounds a week for beef, pork, lamb and mutton using a coupon system.

1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in New York of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union. (They were executed in June 1953.)

1971: Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was convicted of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians in the 1968 My Lai massacre. (Calley ended up serving three years under house arrest.) And a jury in Los Angeles recommended the death penalty for Charles Manson and three female followers for the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders. (The sentences were commuted when the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972.)

1973: The last U.S. combat troops left South Vietnam, ending America’s direct military involvement in the Vietnam War.

1974: Eight Ohio National Guardsmen were indicted on federal charges stemming from the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University. (The charges were later dismissed.)

1984: Under cover of early morning darkness, the Baltimore Colts football team left its home city of three decades and moved to Indianapolis.

2002: Israeli troops stormed Yasser Arafat’s headquarters complex in the West Bank in a raid that was launched in response to anti-Israeli attacks that had killed 30 people in three days.

2004: President George W. Bush welcomed seven former Soviet-bloc nations (Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia and Estonia) into NATO during a White House ceremony.

2010: Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up in twin attacks on Moscow subway stations jampacked with rush hour passengers, killing at least 40 people and wounding more than 100.

2018: Russia announced the expulsion of more than 150 diplomats, including 60 Americans, and said it was closing a U.S. consulate in retaliation for Western expulsions of Russian diplomats over the poisoning of an ex-spy and his daughter in Britain.

2020: Country singer Joe Diffie, who had a string of hits in the 1990s, died at 61 from what a spokesman said were complications from COVID-19.

2021: The former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd went on trial with prosecutors showing the jury video of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on the Black man’s neck for several minutes as onlookers yelled at him repeatedly to get off and Floyd gasped that he couldn’t breathe. (Chauvin would be convicted of murder and manslaughter and sentenced to 22½ years in prison.) 2021: G. Gordon Liddy, a mastermind of the Watergate burglary and a radio talk show host after emerging from prison, died at age 90 at his daughter’s home in Virginia. 2022: The Foo Fighters canceled all upcoming concert dates four days after the death of the band’s drummer, Taylor Hawkins.

AP, FILE Desolation in this part of the Dust Bowl is graphically illustrated by these rippling dunes banked against a fence, farm home, barn and windmill in Guymon, Okla., on March 29, 1937. This property was abandoned by its owner when destructive dust clouds forced him to seek fortune elsewhere.

NASA VIA AP, FILE The southwestern quadrant of Mercury is seen in this picture taken by the Mariner 10 spacecraft on March 29, 1974. The picture was taken four hours before the time of closest approach when Mariner was 122,000 miles from the planet. The largest craters are about 62 miles in diameter in this photo.

AP, FILE A photographer looks over wreckage as smoke rises in the background from burning oil storage tanks at Valdez, Alaska, on March 29, 1964. The city was hit hard by the earthquake two days earlier that demolished some of Alaska’s most picturesque and largest cities.