April 11
Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France and one of the greatest military leaders in history, abdicates the throne, and, in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, is banished to the Mediterranean island of Elba. – 1814.
Approximately 25,000 marchers in Watsonville, Calif. show support for United Farm Workers organizing campaign among strawberry workers. – 1997.
April 12
The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries, under General P.G.T. Beauregard, open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. Two days later, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern insurrection. – 1861.
Aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, becomes the first human being to travel into space. – 1961.
The space shuttle Columbia is launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to become the first reusable manned spacecraft to travel into space. – 1981.
April 13
Disaster strikes 200,000 miles from Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blows up on Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission. Astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise had left Earth two days earlier for the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon, but were forced to turn their attention to simply making it home alive. – 1970.
April 14
U.S. president Abraham Lincoln is shot at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army, to effectively end the American Civil War. – 1865.
In what came to be known as Black Sunday, one of the most devastating storms of the 1930s Dust Bowl era sweeps across the plains’ states and hit Texas and Oklahoma the worst on this day. High winds kicked up clouds of millions of tons of dirt and dust so dense and dark that some eyewitnesses believed the world was coming to an end. – 1935.
April 15
The RMS Titanic, billed as unsinkable, sinks into the icy waters of the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage and kills 1,517 persons. – 1912.
Jackie Robinson, age 28, becomes the first African-American player in Major League Baseball when he steps on Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, N.Y. to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. – 1947.
Two bombs go off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and kill three spectators and wound more than 260 others in attendance. – 2013.
April 16
Employers lock out 25,000 New York City garment workers in a dispute over hiring practices. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union calls a general strike; after 14 weeks, 60,000 strikers win union recognition and the contractual right to strike. – 1916.
Vladimir Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, returns to Petrograd after a decade of exile to take the reins of the Russian Revolution. One month earlier, Czar Nicholas II had been forced from power when Russian army troops joined a workers’ revolt in Petrograd, the Russian capital. – 1917.
At 9:12 a.m. in Texas City’s port on Galveston Bay, a fire aboard the French freighter Grandcamp ignites ammonium nitrate and other explosive materials in the ship’s hold which causes a massive blast that destroys much of the city and takes nearly 600 lives. – 1947.
An estimated 20,000 global justice activists blockade Washington, D.C. meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. – 2000.
In one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. history, 32 students and teachers die after being gunned down on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University by a student at the school who later dies from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. – 2007.
April 17
Heavy eruptions of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia are letting up by this day in 1815. The volcano, which began rumbling April 5, killed almost 100,000 persons directly and indirectly. The eruption was the largest ever recorded and its effects were noted throughout the world. – 1815.
The U.S. Supreme Court holds that a maximum hours law for New York bakery workers is unconstitutional under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. – 1905.
The Bay of Pigs invasion begins when a CIA-financed and -trained group of Cuban refugees lands in Cuba and attempts to topple the communist government of Fidel Castro. The attack was an utter failure. – 1961.
With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returns to Earth. – 1970.