Today In History: April 12

1204: The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople.

1606: England adopts the Union Jack as its flag.

1770: Parliament repeals the Townsend Acts.

1782: The British navy wins its only naval engagement against the colonists in the American Revolution at the Battle of Saints, off Dominica.

1811: The first colonists arrive at Cape Disappointment, Washington.

1861: Fort Sumter is shelled by Confederacy, starting America’s Civil War.

1864: Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest captures Fort Pillow, in Tennessee.

1877: The first catcher’s mask is used in a baseball game.

1911: Pierre Prier completes the first non-stop London-Paris flight in three hours and 56 minutes.

1916: American cavalrymen and Mexican bandit troops clash at Parrel, Mexico.

1927: The British Cabinet comes out in favor of voting rights for women.

1944: The U.S. Twentieth Air Force is activated to begin the strategic bombing of Japan.

1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies at Warm Spring, Georgia. Harry S. Truman becomes president.

1954: Bill Haley records "Rock Around the Clock."

1955: Dr. Jonas Salk’s discovery of a polio vaccine is announced.

1961: Soviet Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin becomes first man to orbit the Earth.

1963: Police use dogs and cattle prods on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.

1966: Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American major league umpire.

1983: Harold Washington is elected the first black mayor of Chicago.