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| Mr. Lincoln |
450 – Battle of Formigny: Toward the end of the Hundred Years’ War, the French attack and nearly annihilate English forces, ending English domination in Northern France.
1755 – Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language is published in London.
1783 – Preliminary articles of peace ending the American Revolutionary War are ratified.
1861 – President Abraham Lincoln calls for 75,000 Volunteers to quell the insurrection that soon became the American Civil War.
1865 – President Abraham Lincoln dies after being shot the previous evening by actor John Wilkes Booth.
1892 – The General Electric Company is formed.
912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg. Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.
1920 – Two security guards are murdered during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti would be convicted of and executed for the crime, amid much controversy.
1924 – Rand McNally publishes its first road atlas.
1941 – In the Belfast Blitz, two-hundred bombers of the German Luftwaffe attack Belfast, killing around one thousand people.
1945 – Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is liberated.
1947 – Jackie Robinson debuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball’s color line.
1969 – The EC-121 shootdown incident: North Korea shoots down a United States Navy aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 on board.
1989 – Upon Hu Yaobang’s death, the Tiananmen Square protests begin in China.
2013 – Two bombs explode near the finish line at the Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts, killing three people and injuring 264 others.
Births
1452 – Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, sculptor, and architect (d. 1519)
1741 – Charles Willson Peale, American painter and soldier (d. 1827)
1832 – Wilhelm Busch, German poet, painter, and illustrator (d. 1908)
1841 – Joseph E. Seagram, Canadian businessman and politician, founded the Seagram Company Ltd (d. 1919)
1889 – Thomas Hart Benton, American painter and educator (d. 1975)
1894 – Nikita Khrushchev, Russian general and politician, 7th Premier of the Soviet Union (d. 1971)
Deaths
1446 – Filippo Brunelleschi, Italian sculptor and architect (b. 1377)
1865 – Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States (b. 1809)
1912 – Victims of the Titanic disaster
1980 – Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher and author, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)
1990 – Greta Garbo, Swedish-American actress (b. 1905)
1998 – Pol Pot, Cambodian general and politician, 29th Prime Minister of Cambodia (b. 1925)
2000 – Edward Gorey, American poet and illustrator (b. 1925)
2001 – Joey Ramone, American singer-songwriter (b. 1951)