Men in blue uniforms, Civilian Conservation Corps workers, plant 15,000,000 trees across the wastelands of southern Mississippi, April 11, 1940. They are part of the United Forest Service which will re-establish forests destroyed by logging and lumbering operations decades ago. (AP Photo)
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 5, 2025
Today in history:
On April 5, 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 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, Alabama, 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 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 U.S. air raid on Libya nine days later.
In 1991, former Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, his daughter Marian and 21 other people were killed in a commuter plane crash near Brunswick, Georgia.
In 1994, Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain died by suicide in his Seattle, Washington home at age 27.
In 2010, a coal dust explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine near Charleston, West Virginia, killed 29 workers.
Young Helen Keller