TODAY IN HISTORY
1889: The Oklahoma Land Rush began at noon as thousands of homesteaders staked claims.
1915: The first full-scale use of deadly chemicals in warfare took place as German forces unleashed chlorine gas against Allied troops at the start of the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium during World War I; thousands of soldiers are believed to have died.
1937: Thousands of college students in New York City staged a “peace strike” opposing American entry into another possible world conflict.
1944: During World War II, U.S. forces began invading Japanese-held New Guinea with amphibious landings at Hollandia and Aitape.
1954: The publicly televised sessions of the Senate Army-McCarthy hearings began.
1970: Millions of Americans concerned about the environment observed the first “Earth Day.”
1994: Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, died at a New York hospital four days after having a stroke; he was 81.
2000: In a dramatic pre-dawn raid, armed immigration agents seized 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy at the center of a custody dispute, from his relatives’ home in Miami; Elian was reunited with his father at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.
2004: Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who’d traded in a multi-million-dollar NFL contract to serve in Afghanistan, was killed by friendly fire; he was 27.
2005: Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom outside Washington, D.C., to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers to kill Americans. (Moussaoui is serving a life prison sentence.)
2010: The Deepwater Horizon oil platform, operated by BP, sank into the Gulf of Mexico two days after a massive explosion that killed 11 workers.
2012: The U.S. and Afghanistan reached a deal on a strategic partnership agreement ensuring that Americans would provide military and financial support to the Afghan people for at least a decade beyond 2014, the deadline for most foreign forces to withdraw.
2013: A seriously wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged in his hospital room with bombing the Boston Marathon in a plot with his older brother, Tamerlan, who died after a fierce gunbattle with police.