April 26
From the Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can change
[change] Births
- 1886 - Gabdulla Tukay, Tatar poet (d. 1913)
- 1892 - John Murray, Australian army officer (d. 1951)
- 1894 - Rudolf Hess, Nazi leader (d. 1987)
- 1900 - Charles Richter - American seismologist, creator of the Richter scale (d. 1985)
- 1938 - Duane Eddy, American guitarist
- 1975 - Joey Jordison, American musician (Slipknot)
[change] Deaths
- 1865 - John Wilkes Booth, the man who killed United States President Abraham Lincoln.
- 1984 - Count Basie
[change] Events
- 1478 - The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de' Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Florence Cathedral.
- 1607 - English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
- 1865 - American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman near Durham, North Carolina.
- 1865 - Union cavalry troopers corner John Wilkes Booth, President Lincoln's assassin, in a barn in Virginia. Booth is shot dead by cavalryman Boston Corbett.
- 1925 - Paul von Hindenburg defeats Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election to become the first directly elected Reichspräsident, the head of state of the Weimar Republic.
- 1933 - The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
- 1937 - Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.
- 1942 - The worst-ever mining accident in history kills 1,549 miners in an explosion at the Honkeiko Colliery, Manchuria.
- 1946 - Father Divine, a controversial religious leader who claims to be God, marries the much-younger Edna Rose Ritchings, a celebrated anniversary in the International Peace Mission movement.
- 1954 - The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.
- 1962 - NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
- 1964 - Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.
- 1986 - In Ukraine, a nuclear reactor at the Chornobyl (Chernobyl) nuclear plant explodes, creating the world's worst nuclear disaster.
- 1991 - Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before its end, Andover, Kansas would record the year's only F5 tornado (see The Andover, Kansas Tornado).
- 1994 - South Africa holds its first multiracial elections.
- 1994 - A China Airlines Airbus A-300-600R crashes at Nagoya Airport, Japan killing 264.
- 2002 - 19-year-old Robert Steinhäuser shoots and kills 17 people at his school in Erfurt, Germany.
- 2005 - Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country.