Today in History: April 16

2003: At age 40, Michael Jordan, widely regarded as the best player in the history of basketball, played his last game in the National Basketball Association.

1977: The ban on women attending West Point is lifted.

1972: Two giants pandas arrive in the U.S. from China.

1968: The Pentagon announces the "Vietnamization" of the war.

1948: In order to restore the economy of Europe after World War II, 16 European countries formed the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (later the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

1947: A lens which provides zoom effects is demonstrated in New York City.

1945: American troops enter Nuremberg, Germany.

1944: The destroyer USS Laffey survives horrific damage from attacks by 22 Japanese aircraft off Okinawa.

1942: The Island of Malta is awarded the George Cross in recognition for heroism under constant German air attack. It was the first such award given to any part of the British Commonwealth.

1922: Annie Oakley shoots 100 clay targets in a row, setting a woman's record.

1922: British author Sir Kingsley Amis, who created in his first novel, Lucky Jim(1954), a comic figure that became a household word in Great Britain in the 1950s, was born.

1917: Vladimir Ilich Lenin ended his 17-year exile and returned to Russia to form a provisional government.

1912: On this day in 1912, American aviator Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel, guiding her French Blériot monoplane through heavy overcast from Dover, England, to Hardelot, France.

1862: Confederate President Jefferson Davis approves a conscription act for white males between 18 and 35.

1862: Slavery is abolished in the District of Columbia.

1854: San Salvador is destroyed by an earthquake.

1838: French forces occupied the Mexican city of Veracruz during the Pastry War.

1818: The U.S. Senate ratifies the Rush-Bagot amendment to form an unarmed U.S.-Canada border.

1755: Painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, known for her portraits of Queen Marie-Antoinette, was born in Paris.

1746: An English army defeated a Scottish force under Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) at the Battle of Culloden, ending the Jacobite effort to restore the Stuarts to England's throne.

1705: Queen Anne of England knights Isaac Newton.

1646: Architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who redesigned and expanded the Palace of Versailles, was born in Paris.

1065: The Norman Robert Guiscard takes Bari, ending five centuries of Byzantine rule in southern Italy.

556: Pelagius I begins his reign as Catholic Pope.

69: Defeated by Vitellius' troops at Bedriacum, Otho commits suicide.