Colonel Robert E. Lee resigns from the United States army two days after he was offered command of the Union army and three days after his native state, Virginia, seceded from the Union. Lee opposed secession, but he was a loyal son of Virginia. His official resignation was only one sentence, but he wrote a longer explanation to his friend and mentor, General Winfield Scott, later that day. Lee had fought under Scott during the Mexican War (1846-48), and he revealed to his former commander the depth of his struggle. Lee spoke with Scott on April 18, and explained that he would have resigned then “but for the struggle it has cost me to…

Two teenage gunmen kill 13 people in a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. At about 11:20 a.m., Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, dressed in long trench coats, began shooting students outside the school before moving inside to continue their rampage. By the time SWAT team officers finally entered the school at about 3:00 p.m., Klebold and Harris had killed 12 fellow students and a teacher, and had wounded another 23 people. Then, around noon, they turned their guns on themselves and committed suicide. The awful crime captured the nation’s attention, prompting an unprecedented search–much of it based on false information–for a scapegoat on whom to pin the blame.…

The first New York state constitution is formally adopted by the Convention of Representatives of the State of New York, meeting in the upstate town of Kingston, on this day in 1777. The constitution began by declaring the possibility of reconciliation between Britain and its former American colonies as remote and uncertain, thereby making the creation of a new New York government necessary for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order. Three governmental branches were created by the new constitution: an executive branch, a judicial branch and a legislative branch. The constitution called for the election of a governor and 24 senators and identified eligible voters as men…

By JULIE DELCOUR World Staff Writer Published: 4/18/2010  2:23 AM Lou Michel recalls without hesitation the moment on a May day in 1999 when Timothy McVeigh delivered a soliloquy so dark, so chilling that the hair rose on the back of the veteran reporter’s neck. Caught in the act of being himself, nothing else McVeigh would say during a 45-hour confession matched that moment for defining America’s worst mass murderer. “I’ve heard your stories many times before,” McVeigh began, as if speaking directly to the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing rather than into the tape recorder of his biographer. “The specific details may be unique, but the truth is you’re…