Today in History:
On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715th career home run in a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, breaking Babe Ruth’s record.
On this date:
In 1513, explorer Juan Ponce de Leon and his expedition began exploring the Florida coastline.
In 1864, the United States Senate passed, 38-6, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery. (The House of Representatives passed it in January 1865; the amendment was ratified and adopted in December 1865.)
In 1911, an explosion at the Banner Coal Mine in Littleton, Alabama, claimed the lives of 128 men, most of them convicts loaned out from prisons.
In 1913, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for popular election of U.S. senators was ratified.
In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a freeze on wages and prices to combat inflation.
In 1952, President Harry S. Truman seized the American steel industry to avert a nationwide strike.
In 1973, artist Pablo Picasso died in Mougins (MOO’-zhun), France, at age 91.
In 1990, Ryan White, the teenage AIDS patient whose battle for acceptance had gained national attention, died in Indianapolis at age 18.
In 1992, tennis great Arthur Ashe announced at a New York news conference that he had AIDS.
In 1993, singer Marian Anderson died in Portland, Oregon, at age 96.
In 2010, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New START treaty in Prague.
In 2012, Bubba Watson saved par from the pine straw and won the Masters on the second hole of a playoff over Louis Oosthuizen.
In 2013, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 87, died in London, while actress and former Disney “Mouseketeer” Annette Funicello, 70, died in Bakersfield, California.
In 2018, Patrick Reed won the Masters golf tournament for his first victory in a major.
In 2020, a 76-day lockdown was lifted in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the global pandemic began.
In 2022, the movie academy banned Will Smith from attending the Oscars or any other academy event for 10 years following his slap of Chris Rock at the Academy Awards.
In 2023, Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, died at age 103.