Apr 5, 2023 2 min read

Today in history Today is Wednesday, April 5, the 95th day of 2023. There are 270 days left in the year. In 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death following their conviction in New York on charges of conspiring to commit espionage for the Soviet Union. In 1614, Indian Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas married Englishman John Rolfe, a widower, in the Virginia Colony. In 1621, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts on a monthlong return trip to England. In 1764, Britain’s Parliament passed The American Revenue Act of 1764, also known as the Sugar Act. In 1887, in Tuscumbia, Ala., teacher Anne Sullivan achieved a breakthrough as her 6-year-old deafblind pupil, Helen Keller, learned the meaning of the word “water” as spelled out in the Manual Alphabet. In 1976, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes died in Houston at age 70. In 1986, two American servicemen and a Turkish woman were killed in the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, an incident that prompted a U.S. air raid on Libya more than a week later. In 1987, Fox Broadcasting Co. made its prime-time TV debut by airing the situation comedy “Married with Children” followed by “The Tracey Ullman Show,” then repeating both premiere episodes two more times in the same evening. In 1991, former Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, his daughter Marian and 21 other people were killed in a commuter plane crash near Brunswick, Ga. In 2008, actor Charlton Heston, big-screen hero and later leader of the National Rifle Association, died in Beverly Hills, Calif., at age 84. In 2010, an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine near Charleston, W.Va., killed 29 workers. In a televised rescue, 115 Chinese coal miners were freed after spending eight days trapped in a flooded mine, surviving an accident that had killed 38. In 2016, UConn won an unprecedented fourth straight women’s national championship, capping another perfect season by routing Syracuse, 82-51.