Today:
1. 1860: The first successful United States Pony Express run from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, began.
2. 1882: American outlaw Jesse James was shot and killed by Robert Ford in St. Joseph, Missouri.
3. 1948: President Harry S. Truman signed the Marshall Plan, which provided aid to help rebuild war-torn Europe after World War II.
4. 1968: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, Tennessee, the day before he was assassinated.
5. 1973: The first portable cell phone call was made by Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher, in New York City.
6. 1996: Suspected “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski was arrested at his remote cabin in Montana.
7. 2000: United States v. Microsoft: The U.S. Justice Department ruled that Microsoft had violated U.S. antitrust laws by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors.
8. 2010: Apple Inc. released the first-generation iPad, revolutionizing the tablet computer market.
9. 2018: In the U.S., SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SpaceX CRS-14 mission to the International Space Station.
10. 2020: The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide surpassed one million, with the global death toll surpassing 50,000.