April 5 · This Day in America
In a small church at Jamestown, a young Powhatan woman the English call Rebecca marries a tobacco planter named John Rolfe. Her birth name is Pocahontas; her father is Powhatan, paramount chief of dozens of nations along these rivers. She has been a hostage, has learned English, has been baptized. The marriage is many things at once — a personal union and a fragile treaty — and for several years it holds, buying the struggling colony a rare peace. Two cultures that mostly met with muskets and mistrust meet, here, at an altar. The peace would not last her lifetime, and her story is told as often as it is simplified. But on this day, in a settlement that nearly starved, two peoples chose, for a moment, not war but a wedding.
Source: encyclopediavirginia.org
Also on this day · 1933
Five weeks into his presidency, with banks failing and the Depression at its deepest, Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 6102. It commands citizens to hand nearly all their gold coin and bullion to the Federal Reserve, freeing the government to expand the money supply. It is one of the most sweeping economic orders an American president has ever given — a measure of how close the bottom felt that spring.
Source: www.presidency.ucsb.edu