This Week in History – April 4-April 10
April 4, 1893 – The Minnesota state flag is adopted, just in time to grace a state-sponsored exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Designed by Amelia H. Center of Minneapolis, the flag depicts the state seal ringed by a wreath of white lady slippers and surrounded by nineteen stars, representing Minnesota as the nineteenth state (after the original thirteen) to be admitted to the Union. The flag would be modified on March 18, 1957, when the white flowers were replaced with pink-and-white lady slippers.
April 4, 1949 – Twelve nations signed a treaty creating NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The nations united for common military defense against the threat of expansion by Soviet Russia into Western Europe.
April 4, 1968 – Civil Rights leader and Baptist minister, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, was shot and killed by a sniper in Memphis, TN. As head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he championed non-violent resistance to end racial oppression and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He is best remembered for hisI Have a Dream speech delivered at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. That march and King’s other efforts helped the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1986, Congress established the third Monday in January as a national holiday in his honor.
April 4, 1975 – Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.
April 5, 1830– The first work of fiction set in Minnesota, a collection of stories about fur traders and Native Americans titled Tales of the Northwest, is published in Boston. The author, William J. Snelling, is the son of Josiah Snelling, for whom Fort Snelling is named.
April 5, 1856– Educator Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, VA. Freed by the Civil War, he taught himself the alphabet and eventually graduated from an agricultural institute. In June of 1881, he became the principal of a new training school for blacks at Tuskegee, AL. The Tuskegee Institute began in single building with 30 students but through his efforts grew into a modern university.
April 5, 1923 –Firestone Tire and Rubber Company starts producing inflatable tires.
April 5, 1951 – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, atomic spies for Soviet Russia, are sentenced to death.
April 5, 1953– In Washington, D.C., President Dwight Eisenhower inaugurated the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (its name was later changed to the Annual National Prayer Breakfast).
April 5, 1986 – A bomb exploded at a popular discotheque frequented by American military personnel in West Berlin, killing two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman. American intelligence analysts attributed the attack to Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. Nine days later, President Ronald Reagan ordered a retaliatory air strike against Libya.
April 6, 1528 – Albrecht Durer, German painter, engraver, and designer of woodcuts, dies. Famous for religious scenes, he was influenced by Martin Luther. His most popular work is “Praying Hands.”
April 6, 1808 – John Jacob Astor forms the American Fur Company, headquartered in NYC. It operates fur-trading posts on the Rainy River, Grand Portage, Grand Marais, as well as on Moose, Basswood, Vermillion, and Little Vermillion lakes. The company would exist until 1842.
April 6, 1917– Following a vote by Congress approving a declaration of war, the U.S. entered World War I in Europe.
April 6, 1932– Eric Liddell, the Olympic athlete featured in the film Chariots of Fire, makes his evangelistic debut by sharing his testimony to a group of men in Armadale, Scotland. Liddell later returned to the mission field in China, where he was born, and ministered in an internment camp following the Japanese invasion. He died in 1945 from a massive brain tumor.
April 6, 1956– The ore boat C. L. Austin picks up the first load of taconite at Silver Bay.
April 7, 1805– Lewis and Clark Expedition leaves Fort Manden beginning their historic journey to the Pacific Ocean.
April 7, 1827– English chemist John Walker invents wooden matches.
April 7, 1866 – In Washington, D.C., the Bois Forte Ojibwe sign a treaty ceding their lands in St. Louis and Koochiching Counties and establishing the Nett Lake Reservation.
April 8, 1913 – The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified requiring direct popular election of U.S. senators. Previously, they had been chosen by state legislatures.
April 8, 1943– Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt, in a misguided attempt to check inflation, freezes wages and prices, and prohibits workers from changing jobs.
April 8, 1948– In McCollum v. Board of Education, former KKK member and atheist Justice Hugo Black hands down a decision of the Supreme Court that religious education in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment based on the fictitious “separation of church and state” which is neither stated nor implied in the Amendment.
April 8, 1952 – Democrat President Harry S. Truman seized control of America’s steel mills to prevent a shutdown by strikers. However, on April 29th, the seizure was, of course, ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court. Workers immediately began a strike lasting 53 days, ending when they received a 16-cents per-hour wage increase and additional benefits.
April 8, 2009 – In a major leap to more government intrusion into private health care, Democrat President Barack Obama, by executive order, established the White House Office of Health Reform, eventually leading to quadrupled health insurance premiums and under what was infamously called “Obamacare,” which penalized individual Americans hundreds of dollars if they chose to opt-out of the expensive plan.
April 9, 1768 – John Hancock refuses to allow two British customs agents to go below deck of his ship, considered to be the first act of physical resistance to British authority in the colonies.
April 9, 1849 – Minnesota receives word that it is a territory of the United States, a month after the bill is signed by President James K. Polk.
April 9, 1865 – After over 500,000 American deaths, the Civil War effectively ended as General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant in the village of Appomattox Court House.
April 9, 1866 – Despite a veto by Democrat President Andrew Johnson , the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 was passed by an overwhelmingly Republican Congress 122-41 marking the first time Congress legislated on civil rights, granting blacks the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship.
April 9, 1945 – The National Socialist (Nazi) Gestapo hangs German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after his alleged involvement in a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s last recorded words were, “This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.”
April 9, 1963v – Winston Churchill becomes the first honorary U.S. citizen.
April 10, 1815 –Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies experiences a cataclysmic eruption, one of the most powerful in history, killing around 71,000 people, causes global volcanic winter (not “global warming”).
April 10, 1829 – English evangelist William Booth, founder and first general of the Salvation Army, is born in Nottingham. In 1865, Booth and his wife, Catherine, set out to reach the desperate poor and unchurched by conducting open-air meetings with lively music; preaching in theaters, bars, and jails; and creating large-scale plans to relieve poverty. His organization launched what became one of the most successful religious revivals in the modern era.
April 10, 1849 –The safety pin is patented by Walter Hunt (NYC); he sold the rights for $400.
April 10, 1942 – During World War II in the Pacific, the Bataan Death March began as American and Filipino prisoners were forced on a six-day march from an airfield on Bataan to a camp near Cabanatuan. Some 76,000 Allied POWs including 12,000 Americans were forced to walk 60 miles under a blazing sun without food or water to the POW camp, resulting in over 5,000 American deaths.
April 10, 1945 – The National Socialist (Nazi) concentration camp at Buchenwald was liberated by U.S. troops. Of a total of 238,980 Buchenwald inmates, 56,545 perished during its eight-year existence.
April 10, 1952 – Watchman Nee is arrested in Shanghai. This Chinese Christian becomes well-known in the West when his many books are published.