A Focus on History: April 1 through April 7

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April 1

English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. – 1700.

Eleven-day strike by 34,000 New York City transit workers begins, and halts bus and subway service in all five boroughs before strikers return to work with a 17% raise over two years plus a cost-of-living adjustment. – 1980.

April 2

German Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, “the Desert Fox,” resumes his advance into Cyrenaica, modern-day Libya, to signal the beginning of what nine days later will become the recapture of Libya by the Axis forces. – 1941.

Major League Baseball players end a 232-day strike, which began August 12, 1994 and led to the cancellation of the 1994 postseason, including the World Series. – 1995.

April 3

The first Pony Express mail, traveling by horse and rider relay teams, simultaneously leaves St. Joseph, Mo., and Sacramento, Calif.. Ten days later, April 13, the westbound rider and mail packet completed the approximately 1,800-mile journey and arrives in Sacramento to beat the eastbound packet’s arrival in St. Joseph by two days to set a new standard for speedy mail delivery. – 1860.

President Harry S Truman signs off on legislation to establish the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, more popularly known as the Marshall Plan. The act eventually provided more than $12 Billion, approximately $114 Billion in today’s dollars, of assistance to aid in the economic recovery of Western Europe. -1948.

Over 16, hours 148 tornadoes hit the United States heartland. By the time the deadly storm ended, 330 persons died. It was the largest grouping of tornadoes recorded in its time, and affected 11 states, including Illinois, and Ontario, Canada. At any one moment during the storm, there were as many as 15 tornadoes touching the ground. – 1974.

April 4

Only 31 days after assuming office, William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, dies of pneumonia at the White House. – 1841.

Just after 6 p.m. April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old. – 1968.

April 5

Two small towns in Mississippi and Georgia are devastated by tornadoes which kill 200 residents in one of the deadliest spates of tornadoes in United States history. A total of 466 persons were killed over four days of nearly continuous twisters. Another 3,500 were injured. – 1936

Columnist Victor Riesel, a crusader against labor racketeers, was blinded in New York City when a hired assailant threw sulfuric acid in his face. – 1956.

April 6

The first slave revolt in the U.S. occurs at a slave market in New York City’s Wall Street area. Twenty-one blacks were executed for killing nine whites. The city responded by strengthening its slave codes. – 1712.

In Fayette Township, N.Y., Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, organizes the Church of Christ during a meeting with a small group of believers. – 1830.

The Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition. – 1896.

Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and U.S. formally enters World War I. When World War I erupted in 1914, president Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of U.S. citizens favored. When Germany declared unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters it destroyed several civilian ships with U.S. citizens aboard. With that the U.S. took action. When the war finally ended, November 11, 1918, more than two Million U.S. soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives. – 1917.

April 7

Rwandan armed forces kill 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in the genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In approximately three months, the Hutu extremists who controlled Rwanda brutally murdered an estimated 500,000 to one Million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the worst episode of ethnic genocide since World War II. – 1994.

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