TODAY IN HISTORY
1866: The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was incorporated.
1912: The British liner RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, bound for New York on its ill-fated maiden voyage.
1932: German President Paul Von Hindenburg was reelected in a runoff, with Adolf Hitler coming in second.
1947: Team President Branch Rickey called Jackie Robinson up to the Brooklyn Dodgers from their minor league affiliate the Montreal Royals. (Less than a week later, Robinson would become the first Black player in Major League Baseball when he took the field for the Dodgers.)
1963: The fast-attack nuclear submarine USS Thresher (SSN-593) sank during deep-diving tests east of Cape Cod, Mass., in a disaster that claimed 129 lives.
1971: A table tennis team from the United States arrived in China at the invitation of the communist government for a goodwill visit that came to be known as “ping-pong diplomacy.”
1972: The United States and the Soviet Union joined some 70 nations in signing an agreement banning biological warfare.
1974: Golda Meir announced her resignation as prime minister of Israel.
1998: The Northern Ireland peace talks concluded as negotiators reached a landmark settlement to end 30 years of bitter rivalries and bloody attacks.
2005: Tiger Woods won his fourth Masters with a spectacular finish of birdies and bogeys.
2010: Polish President Lech Kaczynski, 60, was killed in a plane crash in western Russia that also claimed the lives of his wife and top Polish political, military and church officials.
2017: Justice Neil Gorsuch took his place as the newest addition on the bench of the Supreme Court, restoring a narrow conservative majority.
2018: During five hours of questioning from a U.S. Senate panel, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg batted away accusations that he had failed to protect the personal information of millions of Americans from Russians intent on upsetting the U.S. election.
2019: Scientists released the first image ever made of a black hole, revealing a fiery, doughnut-shaped object in a galaxy 53 million lightyears from earth.