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1981: On this day in 1981, NASA launched the first space shuttle, Columbia, which was designed to orbit Earth, transport people and cargo to and from orbiting spacecraft, and glide to a runway landing on its return to Earth.
1966: Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American major league umpire.
1963: Police use dogs and cattle prods on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.
1961: Russian cosmonaut Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first human in outer space.
1955: Dr. Jonas Salk's discovery of a polio vaccine is announced.
1954: Bill Haley records "Rock Around the Clock."
1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies at Warm Spring, Georgia. Harry S. Truman becomes president.
1944: The U.S. Twentieth Air Force is activated to begin the strategic bombing of Japan.
1927: The British Cabinet comes out in favor of voting rights for women.
1916: American cavalrymen and Mexican bandit troops clash at Parrel, Mexico.
1911: Pierre Prier completes the first non-stop London-Paris flight in three hours and 56 minutes.
1877: The first catcher's mask is used in a baseball game.
1864: Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest captures Fort Pillow, in Tennessee.
1861: Fort Sumter, one of the few military installations in the South still in Federal hands, came under fire from Confederate guns in Charleston, South Carolina, thus initiating the American Civil War.
1811: The first colonists arrive at Cape Disappointment, Washington.
1782: The British navy wins its only naval engagement against the colonists in the American Revolution at the Battle of Saints, off Dominica.
1777: American statesman Henry Clay was born in Hanover county, Virginia.
1770: Parliament repeals the Townsend Acts.
1606: The Union Flag, precursor to the Union Jack, was adopted as the national flag of Great Britain.
1204: Alexius V, the last Greek emperor of a united Byzantium, fled Constantinople in the face of the Fourth Crusade.
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