1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is shot – The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, wanted to revive the Confederate cause, mere days after their surrender to the Union Army, bringing the American Civil War to an end. Lincoln died the next day.
0043 BC – Battle of Forum Gallorum: Mark Antony, besieging Julius Caesar’s assassin Decimus Junius Brutus in Mutina, defeats the forces of the consul Pansa, who is killed.
0193 – Lucius Septimius Severus crowned Emperor of Rome
0754 – Pact of Quierzy: Pope Stephen II and Pippin de Korte, King of France confirm support of previous peace treaties between Romans and Lombards and laying groundwork for establishment of the Papal States
1341 – Sack of Saluzzo (Italy) by Italian-Angevine troops under Manfred V of Saluzzo
1471 – Wars of the Roses: Battle of Barnet – Yorkists defeat the Lancastrians and kill the Earl of Warwick
1671 – Cossacks capture Russian peasant leader Stenka Razin
1775 – The first abolitionist society in U.S. was organized in Philadelphia with Ben Franklin as president.
1793 – A royalist rebellion in Santo Domingo was crushed by French republican troops.
1828 – The first edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary was published under the name “American Dictionary of the English Language.”
1831 – Soldiers marching on a bridge in Manchester, England, cause it to collapse.
1860 – The first Pony Express rider arrived in San Francisco with mail originating in St. Joseph, MO.
1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. He actually died early the next morning. U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and his family are attacked in his home by Lewis Powell as part of the same conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln
1889 – The first international Conference of American States began in Washington, DC.
1894 – First public showing of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope took place.
1902 – James Cash (J.C.) Penney opened his first retail store in Kemmerer, WY. It was called the Golden Rule Store.
1906 – US President Theodore Roosevelt denounces “muckrakers” in US press, taken from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
1912 – The Atlantic passenger liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage hit an iceberg and began to sink. 1,517 people lost their lives and more than 700 survived.
1918 – The U.S. First Aero Squadron engaged in America’s first aerial dogfight with enemy aircraft over Toul, France.
1927 – The first Volvo car premieres in Gothenburg, Sweden
1931 – King Alfonso XIII of Spain went into exile and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed.
1932 – World’s first particle accelerator built by Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft performs the first artificial nuclear fission with Lithium at Cambridge University
1939 – The John Steinbeck novel “The Grapes of Wrath” was first published.
1940 – Allied troops land in Norway
1944 – 1st Jews transported from Athens arrive at Auschwitz
1946 – The civil war between Communists and nationalist resumed in China.
1953 – Viet Minh invaded Laos with 40,00 troops.
1956 – Ampex Corporation of Redwood City, CA, demonstrated the first commercial magnetic tape recorder for sound and picture.
1958 – Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 with space dog Laika aboard burns up during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere
1961 – US element 103 (Lawrencium) discovered
1969 – For the first time, a major league baseball game was played in Montreal, Canada.
1971 – US President Richard Nixon ends blockade against People’s Republic of China
1973 – Acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray resigns after admitting he destroyed evidence in the Watergate scandal
1981 – America’s first space shuttle, Columbia, returned to Earth after a three-day test flight. The shuttle orbited the Earth 36 times during the mission.
1984 – The Texas Board of Education began requiring that the state’s public school textbooks describe the evolution of human beings as “theory rather than fact”.
1985 – The Russian paper “Pravda” called U.S. President Reagan’s planned visit to Bitburg to visit the Nazi cemetery an “act of blasphemy”.
1986 – U.S. President Reagan announced the U.S. air raid on military and terrorist related targets in Libya.
1987 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed banning all missiles from Europe.
1988 – Representatives from the U.S.S.R., Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S. signed an agreement that called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan starting on May 15. The last Soviet troop left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989.
1992 – Court throws out Apple’s lawsuit against Microsoft
1994 – Two American F-15 warplanes inadvertently shot down two U.S. helicopters over northern Iraq. 26 people were killed including 15 Americans.
1998 – The state of Virginia ignored the requests from the World Court and executed a Paraguayan for the murder of a U.S. woman.
1999 – Pakistan test-fired a ballistic missile that was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching its rival neighbor India.
2000 – After five years of deadlock, Russia approved the START II treaty that calls for the scrapping of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads. The Russian government warned it would abandon all arms-control pacts if Washington continued with an anti-missile system.
2002 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to office two days after being arrested by his country’s military.
2003 – The Human Genome Project is completed – The project dedicated to mapping the genes of the human genome was started in October 1990.
2007 – At least 200,000 demonstrators in Ankara, Turkey protest against the possible candidacy of incumbent Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
2013 – 20 people are killed in attacks in Mogadishu, Somalia
2017 – Meethotamulla rubbish dump collapses onto houses in Colombo, Sri Lanka killing 26
2018 – US, UK and French forces carry out airstrikes on sites associated with Syria’s chemical weapons program, in response to Douma gas attack
2020 – IMF warns the global economy expected to contract by 3% in 2020 due to COVID-19 “Great Lockdown”, steepest downturn since the Great Depression
2021 – US President Biden says “It’s time to end America’s longest war” confirming his decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by Sept 11
2023 – Royal Bank of Canada named the world’s largest financier of fossil fuels, bypassing JPMorgan, according to the Banking on Climate Chaos report by a group of environmental organizations
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
