TODAY IN HISTORY

1513: Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sighted

present-day Florida.

1625: Charles I acceded to the English throne upon

the death of James I.

1794: Congress approved “An Act to provide a

Naval Armament” of six armed ships.

1912: First lady Helen Herron Taft and the wife of Japan’s ambassador to the United States, Viscountess Chinda, planted the first two of 3,000 cherry trees given to the U.S. as a gift by the mayor of Tokyo.

1945: During World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower told reporters in Paris that German defenses on the Western Front had been broken.

1964: Alaska was hit by a magnitude 9.2 earthquake (the strongest on record in North America) and tsunamis that together claimed about 130 lives.

1968: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth in 1961, died when his MiG-15 jet crashed during a routine training flight near Moscow; he was 34.

1973: “The Godfather” won the Academy Award for best picture of 1972, but its star, Marlon Brando, refused to accept his Oscar for best actor. Liza Minnelli won best actress for “Cabaret.”

1975: Construction began on the Trans-Alaska

Pipeline, which was completed two years later.

1977: In aviation’s worst disaster, 583 people were killed when a KLM Boeing 747, attempting to take off in heavy fog, crashed into a Pan Am 747 on an airport runway on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

1980: 123 workers died when a North Sea floating oil field platform, the Alexander Kielland, capsized during a storm.

2013: Lawyers for Colorado theater mass shooting suspect James Holmes said he would plead guilty to the attack that killed 12 people and serve the rest of his life in prison to avoid the death penalty. (Prosecutors rejected the offer, but Holmes ended up being sentenced to life in prison anyway.) Former South African President Nelson Mandela was admitted to a hospital for pneumonia (he was discharged 10 days later).

2018: Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in an essay on The New York Times website, called for the repeal of the Second Amendment to allow for significant gun control legislation.