Today in history—April 22

1500: Ships under Pedro Álvares Cabral, a Portuguese navigator on a trading mission financed by Florentine bankers, become the first known Europeans to sight Brazil.

1707: Henry Fielding, the London Chief Magistrate and co-founder of the city’s first police force, the Bow Street Runners, is born near Glastonbury, Somerset.  He will also write Tom Jones.

1724: Philosopher Immanuel Kant is born at in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia.)

1864: The U.S. Congress passes the Coinage Act of 1864; the new two-cent coin it authorizes will be the first to carry the motto, “In God We Trust,” at the urging of President Lincoln.

1880: Future lawyer Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is born at Simbirsk, Russia.  He’ll later find that law works too slowly when you’re trying to accomplish real social change.

1889: Some 50,000 land-hungry settlers drive, ride, or sprint in hopes of grabbing farms now opened for settlement in the Indian Territory, in what comes to be called the Oklahoma Land Rush.

1923: TV producer Aaron Spelling (Mod Squad, Starsky & Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Love Boat, Vega$, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, T.J. Hooker, Family, Twin Peaks, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place) is born at Dallas, Texas.   His L.A. home is the largest single-family dwelling in California.

1946: Harlan Fiske Stone (Columbia Law 1898), former dean of Columbia Law School and President of the AALS, dies at Washington, D.C.  He was appointed to the Supreme Court by his Amherst classmate, Calvin Coolidge.

1975: ABC’s Barbara Walters becomes the highest-paid television news personality, with a five-year, $5 million deal.

1994: Richard Milhous Nixon (Duke Law 1937), the first U.S. President to lose his law license, dies at New York City.

2000: Federal agents seize six-year-old Elián González from his relatives’ home in Miami.  That fall the Cuban-American vote in Florida will go strongly against Vice President Gore, probably costing him the election.