Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan confederacy, marries English tobacco planter John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia. The marriage ensured peace between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan tribe for several years.

George Washington exercises the first presidential veto of a Congressional bill on April 5, 1792. The bill introduced a new plan for dividing seats in the House of Representatives that would have increased the amount of seats for northern states. After consulting with his politically divided and contentious cabinet, Washington, who came from the southern state of Virginia, ultimately decided that the plan was unconstitutional because, in providing for additional representatives for some states, it would have introduced a number of representatives higher than that prescribed by the Constitution.

Union forces under General George McClellan arrive at Yorktown, Virginia, and establish siege lines instead of directly attacking the Confederate defenders.

Writer Oscar Wilde is arrested after losing a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry.

On April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating an agency called "Emergency Conservation Work." This would later be subsumed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), an innovative federally funded organization that put tens of thousands of Americans to work during the Great Depression on projects with environmental benefits.

The climax of the most sensational spy trial in American history is reached when a federal judge sentences Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for their roles in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Although the couple proclaimed their innocence, they were executed in June 1953.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the British leader who guided Great Britain and the Allies through the crisis of World War II, retires as prime minister of Great Britain.

On April 5, 1974, Stephen King, a Maine high school teacher who had been writing on evenings and weekends, sees his first full-length novel, Carrie, published. The release by Doubleday & Co. becomes a bestseller and inspires a movie of the same name. For King, Carrie kicks off a phenomenal writing career, one in which he would come to be known worldwide as the Master of Horror.

On April 5, 1984, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scores the 31,420th point of his career, breaking the NBA’s all-time scoring record, which had been held by Wilt Chamberlain. Abdul-Jabbar's record remained unbroken for 38 years.

A march and rally in support of reproductive justice for women draws several hundred thousand people to demonstrations in Washington, D.C. One of the largest protest marches on the nation’s capital, the pro-choice rally came as the U.S. Supreme Court was about to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania state law that limited access to abortions. Many abortion rights advocates feared that the high court, with its conservative majority, might endorse the Pennsylvania law or even overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that made abortion legal.