This Day in History - April 4

1581 - England's Queen Elizabeth I knights Francis Drake, the first English captain to circumnavigate the globe.

1611 - Denmark's King Christian IV declares war on Sweden.

1687 - James II of England orders a pro-Catholic declaration read in church. Bishops refuse and the crisis culminates in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

1841 - President William Henry Harrison dies of pneumonia one month after his inauguration, becoming the first U.S. president to die in office.

1844 - Germany occupies Southwest Africa, Togoland and Cameroons.

1902 - The Rhodes scholarship is established by Cecil Rhodes, empire builder and founder of Africa's Rhodesia.

1942 - Japanese naval forces sink three British warships in the Bay of Bengal during World War II.

1945 - U.S. forces liberate the Nazi death camp at Ohrdruf in Germany.

1949 - North Atlantic Treaty is signed in Washington by foreign ministers of United States, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Canada for mutual assistance against aggression in the North Atlantic.

1959 - Ivory Coast signs series of agreements with Niger, Upper Volta and Dahomey to form the Sahel-Benin Union.

1964 - Archbishop Makarios abrogates 1960 treaty between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, and heavy fighting erupts in northwest Cyprus.

1968 - Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

1975 - A U.S. Air Force transport plane evacuating Vietnamese orphans crashes shortly after takeoff from Saigon, killing more than 130 people, most of them children.

1979 - Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the deposed prime minister of Pakistan, is hung after he is convicted of conspiring to murder a political opponent.

1986 - Israel formally asks for access to United Nations War Crimes Commission file on former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

1988 - Iran hammers Iraq's vital oil centers with missiles and fighter-bombers.

1990 - The National's People's Congress, China's legislature, approves the Basic Law, the constitution that will govern Hong Kong after it reverts to Chinese sovereignty in 1997; Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev warns republic of Estonia to rescind independence declaration.

1992 - More than 1,200 French troops, the first major contingent of a U.N. peacekeeping force, arrive in war-torn Croatia, as Bosnia mobilizes its national guard to quell violence.