Today
1861 - The American Civil War begins when Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
1945 - While on vacation in Warm Springs, Ga., President Franklin D. Roosevelt suffers a stroke and dies.
1961 - Cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, aboard Vostok 1, becomes the first human being to travel into space.
Tomorrow
1909 - Southern writer Eudora Welty is born in Jackson, Miss.
1970 - Disaster strikes 200,000 miles from Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blows up on Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission.
1997 - Eldrick "Tiger" Woods, 21 at the time, wins the prestigious Masters Tournament by a record 12 strokes, the best performance by a professional golfer in more than a century.
Wednesday
1818 - Noah Webster, a Yale-educated lawyer with an avid interest in language and education, publishes his American Dictionary of the English Language.
1865 - President Abraham Lincoln is shot in the head at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., by actor John Wilkes Booth.
1986 - The United States launches air strikes against Libya in retaliation for the Libyan sponsorship of terrorism against American troops and citizens.
Thursday
1912 - At 2:20 a.m., the British ocean liner Titanic sinks into the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada, after striking an iceberg 2 1/2 hours earlier.
1959 - Four months after leading a successful revolution in Cuba, Fidel Castro visits the United States.
1970 - As part of the third phase of U.S. troop withdrawals announced by President Richard Nixon, the 1st Infantry Division departs Vietnam.
Friday
1917 - Vladmir Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, returns to Petrograd after a decade of exile to take the reins of the Russian Revolution.
1943 - Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist, accidentally consumes LSD-25 and discovers its hallucinogenic properties.
1947 - Bernard Baruch, in a speech given during the unveiling of his portrait in the South Carolina House of Representatives, coins the term "Cold War" to describe relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.