On April 20, 1769, Pontiac, famous chief of the Ottawa Indians, was murdered by a member of the Illini tribe.
In 1812 George Clinton died in Washington at 73, the first vice president to die while in office.
In 1836 Congress established the Territory of Wisconsin.
In 1889 Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau, Austria.
In 1898 President William McKinley signed a congressional resolution recognizing Cuban independence from Spain and authorizing U.S. military intervention to achieve that goal.
In 1902 French scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolated the radioactive element radium.
In 1945 the U.S. 7th Army captured the German cities of Nuremberg and Stuttgart.
In 1948 United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther was wounded seriously when a gunman shot him through the window of his Detroit home.
In 1955 Richard J. Daley was sworn in for his first term as Chicago’s mayor. He would be re-elected five times.
In 1964 the Chicago Transit Authority began its Skokie Swift service.
In 1971 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of busing as a means of desegregating schools.
In 1976 the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts could order low-cost housing for minorities in a city’s white suburbs to ease racial segregation.
In 1980 the first Cubans sailing to the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift reached Florida.
In 1982 Archibald MacLeish, the poet, playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner, died in Boston. He was 89.
In 1999, armed with pistols and a semi-automatic rifle, two students killed a teacher and 12 classmates and wounded 26 other people in a five-hour rampage through Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., near Denver, then killed themselves.
