April 28

1788 – Maryland becomes the 7th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1789 – Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on HMAV Bounty, setting Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 sailors adrift and then returning briefly to Tahiti before sailing for Pitcairn Island.

1869 – Chinese and Irish laborers for the Central Pacific Railroad working on the First Transcontinental Railroad lay 10 miles of track in one day, a feat which has never been matched.

1881 – Billy the Kid escapes from the Lincoln County jail in Mesilla, New Mexico, killing Deputies J.W. Bell and Bob Olinger.

1930 – The minor league Independence Producers host the Muskogee Chiefs in the first night game in the history of professional organized baseball at Shulthis Stadium, in Independence, Kansas.

1944 –  Off the Slapton Sands coast in Devon, England, 9 German E-boats attack US and UK units during Exercise Tiger, the rehearsal for the Normandy landings, killing 746 service members and wounding 200 more.

1945 – An Italian Partisan firing squad summarily executes Benito Mussolini and his captured retinue in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra.

1947 – Thor Heyerdahl and crew set out from Callao, Peru on the balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki to demonstrate that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia.

1952 – On the day General Of The Army Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in order to campaign in the 1952 United States presidential election, the Treaty of San Francisco comes into effect, restoring Japanese sovereignty and ending its state of war with most of the Allies of World War II, while the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty (Treaty of Taipei) is signed in Taipei, Taiwan between Japan and the Republic of China to officially end the Second Sino-Japanese War.

1965 –  During the Dominican Civil War, U.S. diplomats request increased security forces to protect an evacuation. A battalion of U.S. Marines land at Haina and move to a hotel where 684 civilians are airlifted to the carrier USS Boxer.

1967 – Cassius ‘Muhammad Ali’ Clay refuses his induction into the U.S. Army and is subsequently stripped of his championship and boxing license.

1970 – President Nixon formally authorizes American combat troops to operate in Cambodia during the Vietnam war.

1975 – General Cao Văn Viên, chief of the South Vietnamese military, departs for the US as the North Vietnamese Army closes in on Saigon.

1978 – The President of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud Khan, is overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by pro-communist rebels.

1986 – High levels of radiation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster are detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden, forcing Soviet authorities to publicly announce the accident.

1988 – Near Maui, Hawaii, flight attendant Clarabelle “C.B.” Lansing is blown out of Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a Boeing 737, and falls to her death when part of the plane’s fuselage rips open in mid-flight, the only fatality of the incident.

1994 – Former CIA counterintelligence officer and analyst, Aldrich Ames pleads guilty to giving U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia and is sentences to life imprisonment without parole.

2004 – CBS News releases evidence of the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq.