April 3
1513 - Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida. He had sighted the land the day before.
1776 - George Washington received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard College .
1829 - James Carrington patented the coffee mill.
1860 - The first Pony Express riders left St. Joseph, MO and Sacramento, CA. The trip across country took about 10 days. The Pony Express only lasted about a year and a half.
1865 - Union forces occupy Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.
1866 - Rudolph Eickemeyer and G. Osterheld patented a blocking and shaping machine for hats.
1882 - The American outlaw Jesse James was shot in the back and killed by Robert Ford for a $5,000 reward. There was later controversy over whether it was actually Jesse James that had been killed.
1910 - Alaska's Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America was climbed.
1933 - First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt informed newspaper reporters that beer would be served at the White House. This followed the March 22 legislation that legalized "3.2" beer.
1936 - Richard Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and death of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.
1942 - The Japanese began their all-out assault on the U.S. and Filipino troops at Bataan.
1946 - Lt. General Masaharu Homma, the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, was executed in the Philippines.
1948 - U.S. President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan to revive war-torn Europe. It was $5 billion in aid for 16 countries.
1949 - Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis debuted on radio on the "Martin and Lewis Show". The NBC program ran until 1952.
1953 - "TV Guide" was published for the first time.
1967 - The U.S. State Department said that Hanoi might be brainwashing American prisoners.
1968 - Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "mountaintop" speech just 24 hours before he was assassinated.
1968 - North Vietnam agreed to meet with U.S. representatives to set up preliminary peace talks.
1972 - Charlie Chaplin returned to the U.S. after a twenty-year absence.
1979 - Jane Byrne became the first female mayor in Chicago.
1982 - John Chancellor stepped down as anchor of the "The NBC Nightly News." Roger Mudd and Tom Brokaw became the co-anchors of the show.
1983 - It was reported that Vietnamese occupation forces had overrun a key insurgent base in western Cambodia.
1984 - Sikh terrorists killed a member of the Indian Parliament in his home.
1984 - Col. Lansana Konte became the new president of Guinea when the armed forces seized power after the death of Sekou Toure.
1985 - The U.S. charged that Israel violated the Geneva Convention by deporting Shiite prisoners.
1986 - The U.S. national debt hit $2 trillion.
1987 - Riots disrupted mass during the Pope's visit to Santiago, Chili.
1993 - The Norman Rockwell Museum opened in Stockbridge, MA.
1996 - An Air Force jetliner carrying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown crashed in Croatia, killing all 35 people aboard.
1996 - Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski was arrested. He pled guilty in January 1998 to five Unabomber attacks in exchange for a life sentence without chance for parole.
1998 - The Dow Jones industrial average climbed above 9,000 for the first time.
2000 - A U.S. federal judge ruled that Microsoft had violated U.S. antitrust laws by keeping "an oppressive thumb" on its competitors. Microsoft said that they would appeal the ruling.
2000 - The Nasdaq set a one-day record when it lost 349.15 points to close at 4,233.68.
2010 - The first Apple iPad was released.
