more events on April 12
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1983
Harold Washington is elected the first black mayor of Chicago.
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1966
Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American major league umpire.
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1963
Police use dogs and cattle prods on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.
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1961
Soviet Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin becomes first man to orbit the Earth.
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1955
Dr. Jonas Salk’s discovery of a polio vaccine is announced.
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1954
Bill Haley records “Rock Around the Clock.”
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1949
Scott Turow, writer and attorney.
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1945
President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies at Warm Spring, Georgia. Harry S. Truman becomes president.
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1944
The U.S. Twentieth Air Force is activated to begin the strategic bombing of Japan.
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1927
The British Cabinet comes out in favor of voting rights for women.
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1916
American cavalrymen and Mexican bandit troops clash at Parral, Mexico.
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1911
Pierre Prier completes the first non-stop London-Paris flight in three hours and 56 minutes.
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1877
The first catcher’s mask is used in a baseball game.
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1864
Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest captures Fort Pillow, in Tennessee.
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1861
Fort Sumter is shelled by the Confederacy, starting America’s Civil War.
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1838
John Shaw Billings, American librarian, army physician.
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1811
The first colonists arrive at Cape Disappointment, Washington.
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1791
Francis Preston Blair, Washington Globe newspaper editor.
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1782
The British navy wins a major naval engagement against the colonists in the American Revolution at the Battle of Saints, off Dominica.
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1777
Henry Clay, the “Great Compromiser”, American politician and statesman who ran unsuccessfully for president three times.
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1770
Parliament repeals the Townshend Acts.
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1606
England adopts the Union Jack as its flag.
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1204
The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople.