On this day in history
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Source: HistoryNet.com
1492: King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sign a decree expelling all Jews from Spain.
1858: Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia patents the pencil with an eraser attached on one end.
1867: Russian Baron Stoeckl and U.S. Secretary of State Seward complete the draft of a treaty ceding Alaska to the United States. The treaty is signed the following day.
1870: The 15th amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race, passes.
1872: First issue of Toronto Mail published; part of today's Globe and Mail.
1874: Metis leader Louis Riel arrives in the east from Manitoba to claim his parliamentary seat of Provencher; he stays in Quebec because of a warrant for his arrest in Ontario for the killing of Thomas Scott.
1909: The Queensboro Bridge in New York opens. It is the first double decker bridge and links Manhattan and Queens.
1916: Mexican bandit Pancho Villa kills 172 at the Guerrero garrison in Mexico.
1943: Rodgers and Hammerstein's first collaboration, Oklahoma, opens on Broadway.
1950: President Harry S. Truman denounces Senator Joe McCarthy as a saboteur of U.S. foreign policy.
1954: Toronto Transit Commission opens Yonge Street subway from Union Station to Eglinton; first line in Canada.
1981: President Ronald Reagan is shot and wounded in Washington, D.C. by John W. Hinckley Jr.
1968: Canada and U.S. agree to renew NORAD for five-year period, from May 12.
1987: Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers is bought for $39.85 million.
2009: B.C. Supreme Court strikes down sections of the government's "gag law" that limits pre-election advertising by unregistered third parties.
