On this date...

Daniel Bakeman: Last Revolutionary War soldier to die

In 1614, Pocahontas, a Powhatan, married Virginia planter and colonial official John Rolfe.

In 1621, the Mayflower departed for England after having deposited 102 Pilgrims at what became the American colony of Plymouth (Massachusetts).

In 1764, George Grenville, Prime Minister of Britain and First Lord of the Treasury, proposed the Sugar Act (also called the American Act of 1764, the American Revenue Act, and the Plantation Act) to raise money from the colonies to help pay Britain’s debt and to fund a standing army in Colonial America.

In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to Great Britain’s prime minister, Frederick, Lord North, from the Smyrna Coffee House in London. It was published in The Public Advertiser, a British newspaper, on April 15, 1774.

In 1776, Washington rides into Providence, continuing the army’s march from Boston toward New York. Two regiments under Major General Nathanael Greene, carefully turned out in clean uniforms, escorted him into town. Crowds gather to see the commander whose army forced the British from Boston. 

In 1792, George Washington exercised the first presidential veto of a Congressional bill. The rejected legislation concerned congressional redistricting.

In 1861, Gideon Wells, the Secretary of the Navy, issued official orders for the relief of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, S.C. U.S.S. Powhatan, Pawnee, Pocahontas, and Revenue Cutter Harriet Lane were ordered to provision Fort Sumter; the squadron commander was Captain Samuel Mercer in Powhatan.

In 1862, Union forces under General George McClellan arrived at Yorktown, Virginia, and established siege lines instead of directly attacking the Confederate defenders.

In 1869, Daniel Bakeman, the last surviving soldier of the U.S. Revolutionary War, died at the age of 109.

In 1887, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, teacher Anne Sullivan achieved a breakthrough as her 6-year-old deaf-blind pupil, Helen Keller, learned the meaning of the word “water” as spelled out in the Manual Alphabet.

In 1893, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, superintendent of the Bureau of Weights and Measures in the U.S. Treasury, published a paper now known as the Mendenhall Order. The paper, entitled “Fundamental Standards of Length and Mass,” defined American measurements by the metric system. Until that point, the U.S. had been using measures that were based on the British Imperial System, but with subtle (and confusing) differences. To standardize American measurements, Mendenhall determined that the fundamental standard of length would be the meter, and the standard of mass would be the kilogram. U.S. Customary units of the yard and pound would then be determined from those measures—essentially making the U.S. a metric-oriented country.

In 1925, the Yankees whip the Dodgers in an exhibition game 16-9, but Babe Ruth collapses in NC due to an ulcer.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating an agency called "Emergency Conservation Work." This would later be subsumed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), an innovative federally funded organization that put tens of thousands of Americans to work during the Great Depression on projects with environmental benefits.

In 1934, Baseball superstar Babe Ruth agreed to do three 15-minute broadcasts a week over NBC for a fee of $39,000 for 13 weeks, $4,000 more than his NY Yankees playing contract.

In 1939, Alexander Gretchaninov's 5th Symphony premiered at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In 1945, US Pvt. 1st Class Sadao S. Munemori knocks out two German machine gun nests and falls on a live hand grenade to save his comrades. He becomes the first Japanese American to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously.

In 1945, in preparation for planned assaults in the Pacific theater of World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was placed in command of all U.S. ground forces, and Adm. Chester Nimitz was placed in command of all U.S. naval forces. This effectively ended the concept of unified commands, in which one man oversaw more than one service from more than one country in a distinct region.

In 1951, Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for espionage; two years later, they became the first American civilians executed for that crime.

In 1962, NASA's Neil Armstrong piloted the X-15 to a height of 54,600 meters.

In 1968, as city officials in Boston, Massachusetts, were scrambling to prepare for an expected second straight night of unrest after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., soul artist and entertainer James Brown helped keep the peace by the sheer force of his music and his personal charisma.

In 1974, the World Trade Center, the tallest building in the world at 110 stories, opened.

In 1984, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar surpassed Wilt Chamberlain as the all-time leading scorer in the National Basketball Association.

In 1987, Fox Broadcasting Co. made its prime-time TV debut.

In 1992, a march and rally in support of reproductive justice for women drew several hundred thousand people to demonstrations in Washington, D.C. One of the largest protest marches in the nation’s capital, the pro-choice rally came as the U.S. Supreme Court was about to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania state law that limited access to abortions.