TODAY IN HISTORY
1862: Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.
1915: Jazz singer-songwriter Billie Holiday, also known as “Lady Day,” was born in Philadelphia.
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.
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.
1949: The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” opened on Broadway.
1959: A referendum in Oklahoma repealed the state’s ban on alcoholic beverages.
1962: Nearly 1,200 Cuban exiles tried by Cuba for their roles in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion were convicted of treason.
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.
1984: The Census Bureau reported Los Angeles had overtaken Chicago as the nation’s “second city” in terms of population.
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.
2017: President Donald Trump concluded a twoday summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, saying he had developed an “outstanding” relationship with the Chinese leader.
2020: Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly resigned after lambasting the officer he’d fired as the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which had been stricken by a coronavirus outbreak; James McPherson was appointed as acting Navy secretary.
2022: The Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, shattering a historic barrier by securing her place as the first Black female justice.