On this day in history
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Source: HistoryNet.com
1776: Americans begin shelling British troops in Boston.
1797: The Directory of Great Britain authorizes vessels of war to board and seize neutral vessels, particularly if the ships are American.
1836: Texas declares independence from Mexico on Sam Houston's 43rd birthday.
1865: President Abraham Lincoln rejects Confederate General Robert E. Lee's plea for peace talks, demanding unconditional surrender.
1908: An international conference on arms reduction opens in London.
1917: Congress passes the Jones Act making Puerto Rico a territory of the United States and makes the inhabitants U.S. citizens.
1923: In Italy, Mussolini admits that women have a right to vote, but declares that the time is not right.
1943: The centre of Berlin is bombed by the RAF. Some 900 tons of bombs are dropped in a half hour.
1946: Ho Chi Minh is elected president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
1951: The U.S. Navy launches the K-1, the first modern submarine designed to hunt enemy submarines.
1955: Claudette Colvin refuses to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks' famous arrest for the same offense.
1956: France grants independence to Morocco.
1965: More than 150 U.S. and South Vietnamese planes bomb two bases in North Vietnam in the first of the "Rolling Thunder" raids.
1974: A grand jury in Washington, D.C. concludes that President Nixon was indeed involved in the Watergate cover-up.
1981: The United States plans to send 20 more advisors and $25 million in military aid to El Salvador.
