April 24 in History

A child inherited the throne of the most powerful empire on earth, and a woman ruled in his place for two decades. Thutmose III became pharaoh around 1479 BC upon the death of his father, Thutmose II, but he was far too young to govern. His stepmother and aunt, Hatshepsut, assumed the role of regent and within a few years declared herself pharaoh, adopting the full royal titulary and even the false beard of kingship in official representations. She ruled Egypt for approximately twenty-two years, one of the longest and most prosperous reigns of any pharaoh. Hatshepsut's regency-turned-reign was unprecedented but not entirely without precedent in Egyptian political culture. Queens had wielded power before, but none had claimed the title of pharaoh outright. Her legitimacy rested on a combination of royal blood, political skill, and the support of key officials, particularly the steward Senenmut, who oversaw her ambitious building program. Her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, carved into the cliffs of the Theban necropolis, remains one of Egypt's most stunning architectural achievements. When Hatshepsut died around 1458 BC, Thutmose III finally assumed sole power at roughly age 30 and immediately launched a military career that would earn him the title "Napoleon of Egypt." His first campaign, culminating in the Battle of Megiddo against a coalition of Canaanite and Syrian city-states, demonstrated the tactical brilliance he had presumably been developing during his long subordination. Over seventeen campaigns, he extended Egyptian control to the Euphrates River in the north and deep into Nubia in the south, creating the largest empire Egypt had ever known. Late in his reign, Thutmose ordered the erasure of Hatshepsut's name and image from many monuments, a campaign of damnatio memoriae whose motives remain debated. Some scholars see personal revenge for decades of sidelined authority. Others argue it was a pragmatic move to ensure an orderly succession for his own son. The defacement was thorough but incomplete, and modern archaeology has restored much of what Thutmose tried to erase, revealing Hatshepsut as one of ancient Egypt's most capable rulers.

Ottoman police knocked on doors across Constantinople on the night of April 24, 1915, arresting 235 Armenian intellectuals, clergy, physicians, and community leaders. By dawn, the Armenian community in the imperial capital had been decapitated of its leadership. The arrested men were deported to prison camps in the Anatolian interior, where most were executed within months. That night marked the beginning of a systematic campaign to eliminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, a campaign now recognized as the first genocide of the twentieth century. The killings had political and demographic logic. The Ottoman government, led by the Committee of Union and Progress under the "Three Pashas," Enver, Talat, and Cemal, viewed the Armenian Christian minority as a security threat during World War I, particularly given Russia's proximity and the existence of Armenian volunteer units in the Russian army. The wartime crisis provided cover for a policy that went far beyond military necessity. Beginning in May 1915, Armenian civilians across eastern Anatolia were ordered to assemble, stripped of possessions, and marched into the Syrian desert on death marches designed to kill through exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. The scale was staggering. An estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenians perished between 1915 and 1923 through mass shootings, forced marches, deliberate starvation, drowning, and burning. Women and children were frequently separated from men, with males executed and females subjected to forced conversion, sexual violence, and enslavement. The killing was not random but administratively organized, with deportation orders issued through official channels, special killing squads formed from released convicts, and property confiscation managed through legal mechanisms. The Republic of Turkey has consistently rejected the genocide designation, arguing that the deaths resulted from wartime chaos, disease, and intercommunal violence rather than a deliberate extermination policy. More than thirty countries, including the United States as of 2019, have formally recognized the Armenian Genocide. April 24 is commemorated worldwide as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and the events of 1915 directly influenced Raphael Lemkin's coining of the word "genocide" in 1944.

Roughly 1,200 Irish republicans seized key buildings across Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 and declared an independent Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. Patrick Pearse, a schoolteacher and poet who commanded the rebel forces, read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to a bewildered crowd of passersby. Most Dubliners had no idea an insurrection was planned. Many were openly hostile to it. The Rising was the work of a small, determined minority within the broader Irish nationalist movement. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization that had infiltrated the Irish Volunteers, planned the rebellion over months, deliberately excluding the Volunteer leadership from key decisions. A shipment of German arms aboard the Aud was intercepted by the Royal Navy on Good Friday, and Eoin MacNeill, the nominal Volunteer commander, issued a countermand canceling all maneuvers when he learned the true purpose of the Easter exercises. The conspirators went ahead anyway, knowing the odds were hopeless. British forces responded with overwhelming firepower. A gunboat on the Liffey shelled Liberty Hall. Artillery reduced parts of O'Connell Street to rubble. Snipers on both sides made movement through central Dublin lethal. Civilian casualties were heavy, far exceeding military losses on either side. After six days, with much of central Dublin burning and further resistance futile, Pearse ordered an unconditional surrender on April 29. Sixty-four rebels, 132 British soldiers, and at least 254 civilians were dead. The British response to the surrender transformed Irish politics. Ninety death sentences were handed down by military courts. Sixteen leaders were executed by firing squad over ten days in May, including the badly wounded James Connolly, who was tied to a chair because he could not stand. Public opinion, initially hostile to the rebels, shifted dramatically. The executions created martyrs where there had been extremists, and within five years, the Irish War of Independence had begun. The Easter Rising failed militarily and succeeded completely as an act of political sacrifice.

Greek soldiers crept out of a hollow wooden horse in the dead of night and opened the gates of Troy, ending a ten-year siege and launching one of the foundational stories of Western civilization. The traditional date for the fall of Troy is April 24, 1184 BC, as calculated by the ancient Greek scholar Eratosthenes. Whether the Trojan War actually happened, and if so what it looked like, remains one of archaeology's most fascinating and frustrating questions. The story as preserved in Homer's "Iliad" and later sources describes a massive Greek expedition to recover Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, who had eloped with or been abducted by Paris of Troy. The resulting war involved heroes like Achilles, Hector, Ajax, and Odysseus in a conflict that blended human ambition with divine interference. The Trojan Horse itself does not appear in the "Iliad," which ends before Troy's fall; the stratagem is described in the "Odyssey" and elaborated in later works, particularly Virgil's "Aeneid." Archaeological excavations at Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey, the site identified by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s as ancient Troy, have revealed a city that was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times over millennia. Troy VIIa, the layer dating to approximately 1180 BC, shows evidence of fire and possible conflict, aligning roughly with the traditional timeline. Whether this destruction was the work of Mycenaean Greeks, an earthquake, or some combination remains uncertain. The archaeological evidence confirms that a significant Bronze Age city existed at the site and was violently destroyed, but it cannot confirm the specific narrative of Homer's epic. The fall of Troy, historical or mythical, became the origin story for multiple civilizations. Rome traced its founding to the Trojan exile Aeneas. Medieval European kingdoms competed to claim Trojan ancestry. The "Iliad" and "Odyssey" shaped Greek education, ethics, and identity for a thousand years. The story's persistence speaks less to its historical accuracy than to its power as a narrative about war, loss, and the terrible costs of pride, themes that lose nothing for being 3,200 years old.

President John Adams signed an appropriation of $5,000 on April 24, 1800, to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress," creating what would become the largest library in the world. The Library of Congress was initially a modest legislative reference collection, housed in the new Capitol building in Washington and limited to books on law, economics, and history that members of Congress might need for their work. Its ambitions were as small as its budget. The library's first major crisis was also its catalyst for transformation. British troops burned the Capitol during the War of 1812, destroying the entire collection of roughly 3,000 volumes. Thomas Jefferson, retired at Monticello and perpetually in debt, offered to sell Congress his personal library of 6,487 books, the largest private collection in the country. Congress accepted in 1815 for $23,950. Jefferson's library was encyclopedic, covering architecture, music, philosophy, science, and literature in multiple languages, and it fundamentally redefined the institution's scope. The Library of Congress was no longer a legislative tool. It was becoming a national library. Growth accelerated under Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who secured the 1870 copyright law requiring that two copies of every work registered for copyright be deposited with the library. That single provision transformed the Library of Congress into the de facto repository of American intellectual production. By the 1890s, the collection had outgrown the Capitol, and Congress authorized the construction of a dedicated building, the Thomas Jefferson Building, which opened in 1897 as the largest library building in the world. Today the Library of Congress holds more than 170 million items, including 40 million books, 73 million manuscripts, 15 million photographs, and 5.5 million maps. Its collections span every format from Gutenberg Bibles to digital archives. The institution Jefferson's purchase transformed serves not just Congress but researchers worldwide, preserving the recorded knowledge of human civilization on a scale no other institution matches. All of it grew from a $5,000 line item in a government budget.

Annie Oakley split a playing card edge-on at thirty paces during her audition, and Buffalo Bill Cody hired her on the spot. In late April 1885, the 24-year-old sharpshooter joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, beginning a seventeen-year partnership that would make her the most famous woman in America and one of the first female international superstars. Sitting Bull, who joined the show the same season, reportedly nicknamed her "Watanya Cicilla," Little Sure Shot, though the accuracy of this story, like many in Oakley's legend, is difficult to verify. Born Phoebe Ann Mosey in rural Ohio in 1860, Oakley learned to shoot to feed her family after her father's death left them in poverty. By age fifteen, she was selling game to hotels and restaurants in Cincinnati and had paid off the mortgage on her mother's house with the proceeds. Her shooting talent brought her to the attention of Frank Butler, an Irish-born exhibition marksman who challenged local shooters to contests for prize money. Oakley beat him, and within a year they were married. Butler became her manager and assistant, a role reversal that was extraordinary for the era. With Buffalo Bill's show, Oakley performed before audiences numbering in the tens of thousands across the United States and Europe. Her act featured shooting dimes tossed in the air, hitting targets while riding a galloping horse, and her signature trick of shooting the ash off a cigarette held in Butler's lips. In 1887, during a command performance for Queen Victoria, the queen reportedly bowed to Oakley, a breach of protocol that suggested even monarchs were not immune to her charisma. On a later European tour, Oakley shot a cigarette from the hand of Kaiser Wilhelm II, a feat she joked about decades later, wishing she had aimed differently. Oakley used her fame to advocate for women's rights, particularly the right to self-defense and military service. She trained an estimated 15,000 women in marksmanship during her career and offered to organize a regiment of female sharpshooters during the Spanish-American War, an offer the government declined. Her combination of lethal skill, personal modesty, and Victorian femininity made her a figure who could challenge gender norms without appearing to threaten them, a balancing act that kept her popular with audiences of all backgrounds for nearly two decades.