What Happened This Day 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.
Born on April 12
1777		Henry Clay, the "Great Compromiser", American politician and statesman who ran unsuccessfully for president three times.
1791		Francis Preston Blair, Washington Globe newspaper editor.
1838		John Shaw Billings, American librarian, army physician.
1949		Scott Turow, writer and attorney.