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
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.
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 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.
April 18
At 5:13 a.m., an earthquake estimated at close to 8.0 on the Richter scale strikes San Francisco, Calif. and kills hundreds of residents when it topples numerous buildings. The quake was caused by a slip of the San Andreas Fault over a segment about 275 miles long, and shock waves could be felt from southern Oregon down to Los Angeles. It was estimated that approximately 3,000 residents died as a result of the earthquake and 30,000 buildings were destroyed, including most of the city’s homes and nearly all the central business district. – 1906.
April 19
At approximately 5 a.m., 700 British troops, on a mission to capture Patriot leaders and seize a Patriot arsenal, march into Lexington, Mass. to find 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the town’s common green. British Major John Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered Patriots to disperse, and after a moment’s hesitation the Americans began to drift off the green. Suddenly, the “shot heard around the world” was fired from an undetermined gun, and a cloud of musket smoke soon covered the green. When the brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Americans lay dead or dying and 10 others were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but the American Revolution had begun. – 1775.
John J. McDermott of New York wins the first Boston Marathon with a time of 2:55:10. – 1897.
In Warsaw, Poland, Nazi forces attempting to clear out the city’s Jewish ghetto are met by gunfire from Jewish resistance fighters, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins. During the uprising, some 300 German soldiers were killed, and thousands of Warsaw Jews were massacred. – 1943.
An American domestic terrorist’s bomb destroys the Oklahoma City federal building and kills 168 persons, 99 of whom were government employees. – 1995.