History by month
April
30 days of history. Every date is an entry point to the events, births, and moments that shaped our world.
April 1
1392 Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale" accidentally birthed a global prank tradition wh
April 2
1917 President Wilson asked Congress to declare war after Germany's submarine campaig
April 3
1865 Union forces seize Richmond, the Confederate capital, delivering a crushing blow
April 4
1968 A single .30-06 bullet from a Remington rifle shattered Martin Luther King Jr.'s
April 5
1242 Russian forces under Alexander Nevsky shattered the Teutonic Knights' charge on
April 6
1896 Athens hosted the first modern Olympic Games in April 1896, drawing the largest
April 7
1994 Hutu militias and government forces slaughtered 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and m
April 8
563 Gautama achieved full awareness during a fateful night of deep meditation, trans
April 9
1865 Robert E. Lee accepted the desperate measure of arming enslaved people with a pr
April 10
1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald releases The Great Gatsby through Charles Scribner's Sons in
April 11
1814 Napoleon surrendered the French crown to end his rule, yet secured sovereignty o
April 12
1861 Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter at 4:30 a.m., igniting the Civi
April 13
1970 A routine fan stir-up in the oxygen tank triggered a catastrophic explosion that
April 14
1865 John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln during a performance of Our Ame
April 15
1865 He died with his thumb still pressed against the spot where Booth's bullet had t
April 16
1746 British Hanoverian forces under the Duke of Cumberland crush the French-supporte
April 17
1521 Martin Luther demanded a single day to reconsider his stance on Church doctrine,
April 18
1775 Joseph Warren dispatched Paul Revere and William Dawes to warn that British troo
April 19
1995 A truck bomb detonates outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 16
April 20
1902 Marie and Pierre Curie isolated a new element from pitchblende that emitted carm
April 21
April 22
1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet stumbled onto Brazil's coast, instantly shifting Po
April 23
1616 William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, in Stratford-upon-Avon — his 52nd bi
April 24
1915 Ottoman authorities rounded up 250 Armenian intellectuals on April 24, 1915, tri
April 25
1945 United States and Soviet troops met in Torgau along the River Elbe, slicing the
April 26
1986 A sudden power surge during a routine test at Reactor Four triggered steam explo
April 27
1521 Chief Lapu-Lapu's warriors repel Spanish forces and kill explorer Ferdinand Mage
April 28
1789 Lieutenant William Bligh and eighteen loyal sailors survive a harrowing open-boa
April 29
1992 The acquittal of four LAPD officers for the brutal beating of Rodney King ignite
April 30
1789 George Washington steps onto the balcony of Federal Hall to take the oath of off