April 28- Mussolini executed
1945: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were shot to death this day by Italian communist partisans near Dongo, Italy. As Allied troops surged through Italy in the wake of a collapsing German defense, Mussolini was captured trying to flee the country. After their execution, their bodies were hung, head downward, in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. Huge jubilant crowds celebrated the fall of the dictator and the end of the war.
1969: French leader Charles de Gaulle resigned his presidency.
1937: Deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was born in Tikrit.
1878: American actor Lionel Barrymore was born in Philadelphia.
1789: Captain William Bligh and 18 of his men were set adrift by mutinous sailors led by the master's mate Fletcher Christian of the British ship Bounty.
1442: King Edward IV of England was born in Rouen, France.
James Monroe
James Monroe, born this day in 1758, was the fifth president of the United States (1817–25). He issued an important contribution to U.S. foreign policy in the Monroe Doctrine, a warning to European nations against intervening in the Western Hemisphere. The period of his administration has been called the Era of Good Feeling.
"We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety."
James Monroe, annual message to Congress, December 2, 1823
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