Today:
1043: Edward the Confessor is crowned King of England at Winchester Cathedral.
1860: The Pony Express begins its first successful run, departing from St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California.
1865: Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, during the American Civil War.
1882: Outlaw Jesse James is shot and killed by Robert Ford in St. Joseph, Missouri.
1922: Joseph Stalin is appointed the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1936: Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed for the kidnapping and murder of the Charles Lindbergh baby.
1948: President Harry S. Truman signs the Marshall Plan, authorizing billions of dollars in aid to help rebuild post-war Europe.
1968: Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee.
1973: Motorola employee Martin Cooper makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel Engel of Bell Labs.
2010: Apple releases the first iPad, a tablet computer that significantly shifts the mobile computing market.