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.
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.
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.
April 21
According to tradition, April 21, 753 B.C., Romulus and his twin brother, Remus, found Rome on the site where they were suckled by a she-wolf as orphaned infants. Actually, the Romulus and Remus myth originated some time in the Fourth Century B.C., and the exact date of Rome’s founding was set by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro in the first century B.C.. – 753 B.C..
April 22
Adolf Hitler, learning from one of his generals that no German defense was offered to the Russian assault at Eberswalde, admits to all in his underground bunker that the war is lost and that suicide is his only recourse. – 1945.
Earth Day, an event to increase public awareness of the world’s environmental problems, is celebrated in the United States for the first time. – 1970.