Today in history:
On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War ended as the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
Also on this date:
In 1789, George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall in New York as the first president of the United States.
In 1803, the United States completed its purchase of the 828,000 square mile (2,140,000 square km) Louisiana Territory from France for 60 million francs, the equivalent of about $15 million; the acquisition roughly doubled the size of the United States.
In 1900, engineer John Luther “Casey” Jones of the Illinois Central Railroad died in a train wreck near Vaughan, Mississippi, staying at the controls to slow his passenger train before it struck a stalled train near an approaching station; Jones was the only fatality of the accident.
In 1945, as Soviet troops approached his Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler took his own life, as did Eva Braun, whom Hitler married the previous day.
In 1973, as the Watergate scandal deepened, President Richard Nixon announced the resignations of top aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst and White House counsel John Dean (though Dean was actually fired by Nixon).
In 1993, top-ranked women’s tennis player Monica Seles was stabbed in the back during a match in Hamburg, Germany, by a man who described himself as a fan of second-ranked German player Steffi Graf. (The man was convicted of causing grievous bodily injury, but was given only a two-year suspended sentence.)
In 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that the World Wide Web, which was invented at CERN four years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee, was free for anyone to use, and released its source code to the public domain.
