Today:
1598 – Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, granting freedom of religion to the Huguenots and ending the French Wars of Religion.
1742 – George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” premiered in Dublin, Ireland.
1829 – The British Parliament granted Roman Catholics the right to vote and hold political office with the Roman Catholic Relief Act.
1849 – Hungary declared itself independent from Austria, with Lajos Kossuth as its governor-president.
1870 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in New York City.
1943 – The discovery of mass graves of Polish officers killed by the Soviet NKVD was announced by Nazi Germany, later known as the Katyn massacre.
1960 – The United States launched Transit 1-B, the world’s first satellite navigation system prototype.
1970 – An oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13, putting the mission in jeopardy and leading to the famous quote, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
1997 – Tiger Woods won the Masters Tournament at age 21, becoming the youngest golfer to do so and the first African American to win the event.
2017 – The U.S. dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB), its most powerful non-nuclear weapon, on an ISIS cave complex in Afghanistan.