On April 11, 1689, William III and Mary II were crowned as joint sovereigns of England.
In 1814 Napoleon Bonaparte abdicated as emperor of France and was banished to the island of Elba.
In 1898 President William McKinley asked Congress for a declaration of war against Spain.
In 1899 the treaty ending the Spanish-American War was declared in effect.
In 1921 Iowa became the first state to impose a cigarette tax.
In 1945 American soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in Germany.
In 1951 President Harry Truman relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur of his Far East commands.
In 1968 President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968, a week after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1979 Idi Amin was deposed as president of Uganda.
In 1991 the musical “Miss Saigon” opened on Broadway.
In 1996, 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, trying to become the youngest person to fly cross-country, was killed along with her father and flight instructor when her plane crashed after takeoff from Cheyenne, Wyo.
In 1997 fire damaged Italy’s 500-year-old San Giovanni Cathedral, home of the Shroud of Turin, which some consider Christ’s burial cloth.
In 2002 Rep. James Traficant Jr. (D-Ohio) was convicted of taking bribes and kickbacks from businessmen and his own staff. (Traficant was sentenced to 8 years in prison.)
In 2003, 10 of the main suspects in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole escaped from prison in Yemen. Also, American troops took the northern Iraqi city of Mosul without a fight.
In 2006 Israel’s Cabinet declared Prime Minister Ariel Sharon permanently incapacitated, officially ending his five-year tenure. Also, June Pointer, the youngest of the Pointer Sisters, died at 52 in Los Angeles.
