This day in history

April 5th, 2025, 2:41 AM

Today is Saturday, April 5, the 95th day of 2025. There are 270 days left in the year.

►Birthdays: Actor Michael Moriarty is 84. Actor Max Gail is 82. Singer Agnetha Fältskog (ABBA) is 75. Rapper-actor Christopher “Kid’’ Reid (Kid ‘n Play) is 60. Rock musician Mike McCready (Pearl Jam) is 59. Country musician Pat Green is 53. Musician-producer Pharrell Williams is 52. Actor Hayley Atwell is 43. Actor Lily James is 36.

In 1614, Pocahontas, the daughter of Tsenacommacah chief Powhatan, married Englishman John Rolfe, a widower, in the Virginia Colony.

In 1764, the British 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 deaf-blind pupil, Helen Keller, learned the meaning of the word “water’’ as spelled out in the Manual Alphabet.

In 1933, as part of his New Deal programs, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a Depression-era work relief program for single men aged 18-25. The program employed more than 2.5 million men for federal conservation and safety projects over its nine-year history.

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. (They were executed in June 1953.)

In 1986, two American servicemen and a Turkish woman were killed in the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, an incident that prompted a US air raid on Libya nine days later.

In 1991, former Republican Senator John Tower of Texas, his daughter Marian, and 21 other people were killed in a commuter plane crash near Brunswick, Ga.

In 1994, Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain died by suicide in his Seattle, Wash., home at age 27.

In 2010, a coal dust explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine near Charleston, W.Va., killed 29 workers.