April 7 ...

In 1770 poet William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, England. In 1862 Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. In 1915 singer extraordinaire Billie Holiday was born in Philadelphia, PA. In 1927 an audience in New York City saw an image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television. In 1933 Prohibition was repealed for beer with no more than 3.2% alcohol, eight months before the ratification of the 21st Amendment, which ended the prohibition of all alcohol. In 1939 Italy invaded Albania. (Less than a week later, Italy annexed Albania.) In 1945 during World War II, American planes intercepted a Japanese fleet that was headed for Okinawa on a suicide mission. In 1947 auto pioneer Henry Ford died in Dearborn, MI, at age 83. In 1948 the World Health Organization was founded. In 1949 the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific opened on Broadway. In 1953 the UN General Assembly elected Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden to be secretary-general. In 1966 the US recovered a hydrogen bomb it had lost off the coast of Spain. In 1969 the Supreme Court unanimously struck down laws prohibiting private possession of obscene material. In 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 intellectuals were slaughtered. In 2001 NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft took off on a six-month, 286 million-mile journey to the Red Planet.