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 A vain rooster tricked by a fox in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales may be th
April 2
1917 Woodrow Wilson had won reelection in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war."
April 3
1865 Fire consumed the Confederate capital before Union soldiers could reach it. Retr
April 4
1968 James Earl Ray fired a single .30-06 bullet from the bathroom window of Bessie B
April 5
1242 Alexander Nevsky positioned his forces on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus on A
April 6
1896 Eighty thousand spectators packed the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens on April 6,
April 7
1994 The assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana on the evening of April 6, 19
April 8
563 Siddhartha Gautama sat beneath a Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, in what is now northea
April 9
1865 Robert E. Lee rode to the McLean house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on A
April 10
1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby sold fewer than 20,000 copies in its firs
April 11
1814 Napoleon Bonaparte signed away an empire with a stroke of ink. The Treaty of Fon
April 12
1861 Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter at 4:30 in the morning on April
April 13
1970 An oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13 at 9:07 PM Houston time on April 13, 19
April 14
1865 John Wilkes Booth slipped into the presidential box at Ford's Theatre at approxi
April 15
1865 Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 AM on April 15, 1865, in a narrow bed in the back r
April 16
1746 The Battle of Culloden lasted less than an hour on April 16, 1746, but it perman
April 17
1521 Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms on April 17, 1521, and refused to r
April 18
1775 Dr. Joseph Warren dispatched two riders from Boston on the night of April 18, 17
April 19
1995 A Ryder truck packed with 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane fuel
April 20
1902 Marie and Pierre Curie isolated a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride on Apr
April 21
April 22
1500 Thirteen ships bound for India stumbled onto a continent. On April 22, 1500, Ped
April 23
1616 William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, in Stratford-upon-Avon, possibly on
April 24
1915 Ottoman police knocked on doors across Constantinople on the night of April 24,
April 25
1945 American and Soviet soldiers shook hands across the Elbe River near Torgau, Germ
April 26
1986 Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded at 1:23 AM on April
April 27
1521 Ferdinand Magellan waded into the shallows off Mactan Island on April 27, 1521,
April 28
1789 Fletcher Christian pressed a cutlass to Captain William Bligh's throat before da
April 29
1992 Los Angeles burned for six days after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four LAPD
April 30
1789 George Washington placed his hand on a Bible and took the oath of office on the