| March 30, 1867 | March 30, 1981 |
| • U.S. Secretary of State William Seward signs a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska for $7 million. The purchase was ridiculed in Congress and in the press as "Seward's folly", "Seward's icebox" and President Andrew Johnson's "polar bear garden". | • President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by a deranged drifter named John Hinckley Jr. The .22 caliber bullet just missed his heart. In an impressive feat for a 70 year old man with a collapsed lung, he walked into George Washington University Hospital under his own power. |
| March 31, 1889 | March 31, 1959 |
| • The Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris in a ceremony presided over by Gustave Eiffel, the tower's designer, and attended by French Prime Minister Pierre Tirard. At 984 feet tall, the Eiffel Tower remained the world's tallest man made structure until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930. | • The Dalai Lama, fleeing the Chinese suppression of a national uprising in Tibet, crosses the border into India, where he is granted political asylum. |
| April 1, 1700 | April 1, 1970 |
| • English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of playing April Fool's jokes. In keeping with the the fun in 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees. | • AMC, the company that introduced the compact car in the 1950's, introduced the Gremlin, America's first subcompact car. The Gremlin was out on the market for only a short time before the Big Three released their own subcompact models . The Gremlin, created to save AMC, floundered. |
| April 2, 1917 | April 2, 1982 |
| • President Wilson asked congress to declare war against Germany, saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy". | • Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, a British colony since 1892 and a British possession since 1833. Under orders from their commanders, the Argentine troops inflicted no British casualties, despite suffering losses to their own units. The 1,800 Falkland Islanders, mostly English speaking sheep farmers, awaited a British response. |
| April 3, 1860 | April 3, 1946 |
| • The legendary Pony Express began service between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. The service lasted only 1½ years before giving way to the transcontinental telegraph. | • Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, the Japanese officer responsible for the Bataan Death March during World War II, was executed. |
| April 4, 1841 | April 4, 1968 |
| • William Henry Harrison of North Bend, Ohio, succumbed to pneumonia one month after his inauguration, becoming the first U.S. president to die in office. | • Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second story room at the Motel Lorraine in Memphis, Tenn. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. |
| April 5, 1614 | April 5, 1951 |
| • Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Indian confederacy, marries English tobacco planter John Rolfe in Jamestown, VA. The marriage ensured peace between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians for several years. | • Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were sentenced to death following their conviction on charges of consipiring to commit espionage for the Soviet Union. |
| April 6, 1896 | April 6, 1917 |
| • The Olympic games, a long lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens, 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. | • The United States formally enters the First World War. By the time the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918, more than 2 million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives. |