This Day In History

From the NY Times On this date in:
1607	An expedition of English colonists went ashore at Cape Henry, Va., to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
1785	Naturalist and artist John James Audubon was born in Haiti.
1865	John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded and killed by federal troops near Bowling Green, Va.
1937	Planes from Nazi Germany raided the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
1945	Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France's Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
1964	The African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.
1989	Actress-comedian Lucille Ball died at age 77.
1998	Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading human rights activist in Guatemala, was bludgeoned to death two days after a report he'd compiled on atrocities during Guatemala's 36-year civil war was made public.
2000	Vermont Gov. Howard Dean signed the nation's first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions.
2001	Junichiro Koizumi was elected prime minister of Japan by the lower house of Japan's parliament.
2002	An expelled student went on a shooting rampage at a school in Erfurt, Germany, killing 13 teachers, two students and a police officer before taking his own life.
2004	The government unveiled the new colorized $50 bill.
2005	Syria's 29-year military presence in Lebanon ended as Syrian soldiers completed a withdrawal brought about by international pressure and Lebanese street protests.