1968:  Robert Kennedy was shot at a campaign event in California. He was running for the 1968 Democratic Party presidential nomination. He died the next day.

1851: Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly began to appear in the Washington National Era, an abolitionist weekly. Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery story was published in 40 installments. The National Era's audience increased as reader after reader passed their copies to others. In March 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin as a book became an instant best seller. The book so polarized the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist debate, some claim that it was one of the causes of the Civil War. When President Lincoln received Stowe at the White House in 1862, legend has it he exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?" (Source: Library of Congress)