On this day in 2004, Madrid suffered a series of terrorist attacks when 10 bombs, detonated by Islamist militants, exploded on four trains at three different rail stations, killing 191 people and injuring some 1,800 others.
| 1985: | | | Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as leader of the Soviet Union. |
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| 1959: | | Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun became the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. |
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| 1942: | | | During World War II, Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific Theatre came under the command of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur following his tour on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. |
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| 1941: | | The U.S. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. |
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| 1930: | | | William Howard Taft was the first U.S. president to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. |
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| 1926: | | African American civil rights leader Ralph David Abernathy was born in Linden, Alabama. |
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| 1544: | | | Torquato Tasso, the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, was born in Sorrento, Kingdom of Naples. |
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