1986 – The world’s worst nuclear disaster to date occurred at Chernobyl, in Kiev. Thirty-one people died in the incident and thousands more were exposed to radioactive material.
0757 – Paolo Orsini replaces his brother Pope Stephen II, as Paul I
1220 – German king Frederick II grants bishops sovereign rights
1336 – Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch famously climbs Mont Ventoux
1392 – Korean Confucian scholar and statesman Jeong Mong-ju is assassinated on the Sonjuk Bridge in Gaeseong (now North Korea). A brown spot on the bridge is still said to be his blood.
1467 – The miraculous image in Our Lady of Good Counsel appear in Genazzano, Italy
1478 – Pazzi conspirators attacked Lorenzo and killed Giuliano de’Medici.
1514 – Copernicus made his first observations of Saturn.
1607 – The British established an American colony at Cape Henry, Virginia. It was the first permanent English establishment in the Western Hemisphere.
1654 – Jews are expelled from Brazil
1655 – Dutch West Indies Co denies Peter Stuyvesant’s desire to exclude Jews from New Amsterdam
1814 – King Louis XVIII lands at Calais from England
1819 – The first Odd Fellows lodge in the U.S. was established in Baltimore, MD.
1859 – Dan Sickles is acquitted of murder on grounds of temporary insanity – 1st time this defense used successfully in the US
1865 – Confederate General J E Johnston surrenders remaining forces to Union General William Sherman at Bennett Place in Durham, North Carolina, ending the US Civil War
1865 – John Wilkes Booth is killed when Union soldiers track him down to a Virginia farm 12 days after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lincoln-assassin-john-wilkes-booth-dies
1904 – General Kuroko leads the Japanese Army against the large Russian force at the Yalu river during the Russo-Japanese War
1913 – Sun Yet San calls for revolt against President Yuan Shikai in China
1921 – Weather broadcasts were heard for the first time on radio in St. Louis, MO.
1925 – Franz Kafka publishes his landmark novel The Trial. The text, which was initially published as Der Process, is a nightmarish account of a man being arrested and prosecuted by a faceless authority for an unknown crime.
1931 – New York Yankee Lou Gehrig hit a home run but was called out for passing a runner.
1937 – German planes attacked Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War for the Spanish nationalist government. This raid is considered one of the first to be attacks on a civilian population by a modern air force.
1942 – Coal mine explosion kills 1,549 at Honkeiko, Manchuria
1945 – Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France’s Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
1949 – Transjordan is officially renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
1952 – US minesweeper Hobson rams aircraft carrier Wasp, kills 176
1954 – Mass trials of Jonas Salk’s anti-polio vaccine begin; the first shot is delivered in Fairfax County, Virginia; more than 443,000 children receive shots over three months
1964 – The African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.
1968 – Students seized the administration building at Ohio State University.
1982 – Argentina surrenders to Great Britain on South Georgia Island, near the Falkland Islands
1984 – US President Ronald Reagan visits China https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reagan-visits-china
1985 – In Argentina, a fire at a mental hospital killed 79 people and injured 247.
1986 – The world’s worst nuclear disaster to date occurred at Chernobyl, in Kiev. Thirty-one people died in the incident and thousands more were exposed to radioactive material. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.aspx
1990 – NY court of appeals ends 2½ year legal battle over 1988 America’s Cup by refusing jurisdiction of case
1994 – Germany makes Holocaust denial illegal. The far-right party NPD had sought legitimation by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court for expressing the view that the Nazis’ genocide of six million Jews never occurred. The court ruled against them.
1998 – Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was bludgeoned to death two days after a report he’d compiled on atrocities during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war was made public.
2002 – Robert Steinhäuser infiltrates and kills 17 at Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.
2005 – Syria ends its military occupation of Lebanon after 29 years. Syria buckled to domestic and international pressure following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14 of the same year.
2007 – Queen’s Pier is officially closed by the Hong Kong Government, after a bitter struggle by conservationists, in order to facilitate land reclamation in Hong Kong’s Central district
2012 – 70 people are killed by rocket attacks by the Syrian Army on the city of Hama
2012 – Indonesia suspends imports of American beef after a confirmed case of mad cow disease in California
2018 – Comedian Bill Cosby is found guilty of sexual assault in Pennsylvania
2019 – “No religion” tops survey of American religious identity for the first time at 23.1% edging out Catholics 23.0% and evangelicals 22.5%, in long-running General Social Survey
2019 – Six suspected militants connected to Sri Lankan terror attacks killed along with ten others in a shootout with police in Sainthamaruthu
2019 – Waorani people of Pastaza win landmark environmental case against the Ecuadorian government to protect half a million acres of their territory in the Amazon rainforest
2021 – President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announces Turkey will go into full lockdown till May 17 to a curb COVID-19 surge and world’s 4th highest caseload
2022 – Russia says it will stop supplying gas to Poland and Bulgaria, after the countries refused to pay in rubles, escalating the energy supply standoff between Russia and Europe
2022 – World Bank warns the war in Ukraine will cause the “largest commodity shock” since the 1970s, with large economic and humanitarian effects
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
