Today in History.....April 7

On this day in …

* 1862, Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee

* 1927, an audience in New York saw an image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television

* 1939, Italy invaded Albania. (Less than a week later, Italy annexed Albania.)

* 1945, during World War II, American planes intercepted a Japanese fleet that was headed for Okinawa on a suicide mission

* 1957, the last of New York's electric trolleys completed its final run from Queens to Manhattan

* 1966, the United States recovered a hydrogen bomb it had lost off the coast of Spain

* 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down laws prohibiting private possession of obscene material

* 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda, a day after a mysterious plane crash claimed the lives of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. In the months that followed, hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and Hutu intellectuals were slaughtered

* 1995, President Clinton threatened to veto a lengthy list of bills passed by the Republican-controlled House if they were not modified in the Senate. ALSO: In a prime-time television address, House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared the GOP "Contract with America" was only a beginning

* 2001, NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft took off on a six-month, 286 million-mile journey to the Red Planet