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
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.
April 20
The Fidel Castro regime announces that all Cubans seeking to emigrate to the U.S. are free to board boats at the port of Mariel, west of Havana and launched the Mariel Boatlift. The first of 125,000 Cuban refugees from Mariel reached Florida the next day. – 1980.
Ludlow massacre: Colorado state militia, using machine guns and fire, kill approximately 20 persons, including 11 children, at a tent city set up by striking coal miners. The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard. – 1914.
Two teenage gunmen kill 13 and wound another 23 in a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.. – 1999.
An explosion and fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, kills 11 workers and triggers the largest offshore oil spill in American history. By the time the well was capped three months later, an estimated 4.9 Million barrels, 206 Million gallons, of crude oil had poured into the Gulf. – 2012.
April 21
A fire at an Ohio prison kills 320 inmates, some of whom burn to death when they are not unlocked from their cells. It is one of the worst prison disasters in American history. – 1930.