Today is Tuesday, April 7, the 98th day of 2020. There are 268 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On April 7, 1862, Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.

On this date:

In 1947, auto pioneer Henry Ford died in Dearborn, Michigan, at age 83.

In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower held a news conference in which he spoke of the importance of containing the spread of communism in Indochina, saying, “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” (This became known as the “domino theory,” although Eisenhower did not use that term.)

In 1962, nearly 1,200 Cuban exiles tried by Cuba for their roles in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion were convicted of treason.

In 1964, IBM introduced its System/360, the company’s first line of compatible mainframe computers that gave customers the option of upgrading from lower-cost models to more powerful ones.

In 2006, a British judge ruled that author Dan Brown did not steal ideas for “The Da Vinci Code” from a nonfiction work.

Today’s Birthdays: Media commentator Hodding Carter III is 85. Country singer Bobby Bare is 85. Rhythm-and-blues singer Charlie Thomas (The Drifters) is 83. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown is 82. Movie director Francis Ford Coppola is 81. Actress Roberta Shore is 77. Singer Patricia Bennett (The Chiffons) is 73. Singer John Oates is 72. Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is 71. Singer Janis Ian is 69. Country musician John Dittrich is 69. Actor Jackie Chan is 66. College and Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Dorsett is 66. Actor Russell Crowe is 56.

Thought for Today: “Money is in some respects life’s fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.” — P.T. Barnum, American showman (born 1810, died this date in 1891).