Today in history

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Today in history

By Correspondent

History in history
YEARDAYEVENT
121Apr 20Marcus Aurelius (d.180), 16th Roman emperor, philosopher, was born. He authored the “Meditations.”
1164Apr 20Victor IV, [Ottaviano Montecello], Italian antipope (1159-64), died.
1139Apr 20The Second Lateran Council opened in Rome. The crossbow was outlawed in the 12th century, at least against Christians, by the second Lateran council (the 10th ecumenical council), called by Pope Innocent II. Capable of piercing chain mail from a range of up to 1,000 feet, this formidable missile weapon remained a fixture of technically-advanced European armies throughout the Middle Ages. Although it was used after the introduction of firearms, it was eventually succeeded by the harquebus””a primitive gun””in the late 15th century. The council attempted universal enforcement of priestly celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church.
1314Apr 20Clement V, [Bertrand Got], pope (1305-14) who moved papacy to Avignon, died.
1317Apr 20Agnes van Montepulciano, Italian mystic, saint, died.
1494Apr 20John Agricola, [Schneider], German theologian, prime minister, was born.
1505Apr 20Jews were expelled from Orange, Burgundy, by Philibert of Luxembourg.
1534Apr 20Elizabeth Barton, [St Magd van Kent], British prophet, died.
1632Apr 20Nicolas Antione, converted to Judaism, was burned at the stake.
1643Apr 20Christoph Demantius (75), composer, died.
1653Apr 20Oliver Cromwell dissolved the English parliament. “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately”¦”
1657Apr 20English Admiral Robert Blake fought his last battle when he destroyed the Spanish fleet in Santa Cruz Bay.
1662Apr 20Gerard Terborch, the elder, painter, died.
1695Apr 20Georg Caspar Weckler (63), composer, died.
1715Apr 20Nicholas Rowe’s “Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray,” premiered in London.
1745Apr 20Philippe Pinel, founder of psychiatry, was born.
1761Apr 20Johann Gottlieb Karl Spazier, composer, was born.
1769Apr 20Ottawa Chief Pontiac (b~1720) was murdered by an Indian in Cahokia.
1770Apr 20Captain Cook arrived in New South Wales, Australia.
1775Apr 20British troops began the siege of Boston.
1777Apr 20New York adopted a new constitution as an independent state.
1786Apr 20John Goodricke (21), English deaf and dumb astronomer, died.
1792Apr 20France declared war on Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia, marking the start of the French Revolutionary wars.
1799Apr 20Friedrich Schiller’s “Wallensteins Tod,” the third part of his Wallenstein trilogy, premiered in Weimar.
1804 Apr 20Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haitian rebel leader, commanded a massacre of the French at town of Cape Francois.
1807Apr 20Aloysius Bertrand (“Gaspard de la Nuit”), French poet, was born.
1808Apr 20Charles Louis Napoleon (d.1873), nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was born. He later served as president (1848-1852) and as emperor of France (1852-1870).
1809Apr 20Napoleon defeated Austria at Battle of Abensberg, Bavaria.
1812Apr 20George Clinton (73), the 4th vice president of the United States, died in Washington, becoming the first vice president to die while in office.
1820Apr 20Arthur Young, author (Annals of Agriculture), died.
1821Apr 20Franz K. Achard (67), German physicist, chemist, died.
1827Apr 20John Gibbon (d.1896), Major General (Union volunteers), was born.
1836Apr 20The Territory of Wisconsin was established by Congress.
1839Apr 20Giuseppe Rossini, father of Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini, died.
1841Apr 20Edgar Allen Poe’s first detective story, “Murders in Rue Morgue,” was published. Poe published in this year 2 secret messages, as the work of W.B. Tyler, that were not deciphered until 1992 and 2000.
1850Apr 20Daniel Chester French (d.1931), sculptor of the Concord Minuteman, was born at Exeter, New Hampshire. He had his estate in Stockbridge, Mass. His work also included the Lincoln Memorial. His Chesterwood estate became a museum with an annual 6-month summer season.
1861Apr 20Robert E. Lee resigned from U.S. Army.
1861Apr 20Battle of Norfolk, VA.
1865Apr 20Chicago’s Crosby Opera House opened.
1869Apr 20Johann Carl Gottfried Loewe (72), composer, died.
1871Apr 20The US 3rd Enforcement Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, allowed the President to suspend writ of habeas corpus.
1879Apr 20The first mobile home (horse drawn) was used in a journey from London to Cyprus. [what about Gypsy wagons, Conestoga wagons?]
1888Apr 20246 people were reported killed by hail in Moradabad, India.
1893Apr 20Joan Miró (Joan Miro), Spanish painter, was born.
1896Apr 201st public film showing in US John Philip Sousa’s “El Capitan,” premiered in NYC.
1898Apr 20President McKinley signed a congressional resolution recognizing Cuban independence from Spain. He signed the Joint Resolution for War with Spain that authorized U.S. military intervention to Cuban independence.
1902Apr 20Radium was isolated as a pure metal by Curie and André-Louis Debierne through the electrolysis of a pure radium chloride solution. Pierre and Marie Curie had discovered the element in 1898.
1906Apr 20In San Francisco Navy Lt. Frederick Freeman led his sailors in holding a line against advancing flames at Chestnut and Lombard and Pier 27 saving the city’s northeast waterfront. In 2005 Dennis Smith authored “San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires.”
1910Apr 20Robert F. Wagner, (Mayor-D-NYC, 1954-65), was born.
1912Apr 20Boston’s Fenway Park, home to Boston Red Sox, opened with its first official baseball game.
1914Apr 20Soldiers killed 33 during mine strike in Ludlow, Colo. In the Ludlow Massacre 2 women and 11 children perished in a mining camp torched by Colorado militiamen called in by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to settle a strike. More than 75 people died during the Colorado coal strike with more than half of them being company guards. In 2007 Scott Martelle authored “Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.”
1915Apr 20The Turks fired the first shot at Van; the first Armenians were deported from Zeitoun on the 8th April, and there is a record of their arrival in Syria as early as the l9th.
1916Apr 20The Chicago Cubs, after merging with the Chicago Whales, began playing at Weeghman Park. In 1926 the stadium became known as Wrigley Field.
1917Apr 20In the Pravda newspaper Lenin named Russia “Free land of world.”
1919Apr 20Polish Army captured Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania from Soviet Army.
1920Apr 20John Paul Stevens, 103rd Supreme Court Justice (1975-), was born in Illinois.
1923Apr 20Tito Puente, bandleader, was born.
1924Apr 20Nina Foch (d.2008), film, theater and TV actress, was born in Leyden, Netherlands.  Her films later included “An American in Paris” (1951).
1927Apr 20Alex Muller, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was born.
1930Apr 20Charles (d.1974) and Anne Lindbergh (d.2001 at 94) set a transcontinental speed record flying from Los Angeles to New York in 14 hours and 45 minutes. Anne was 7 months pregnant.
1931Apr 20British House of Commons agreed to sports play on Sunday.
1935Apr 20“Your Hit Parade” debuted on NBC radio. It was called the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade” by the newspapers. The show was re-named “Your Hit Parade” on November 9. The first number one song chosen for the first show was “Soon” by Bing Crosby.
1936Apr 20Serious rioting took place on the borders between Jaffa and Tel-Aviv, in particular in the Catton, Manshieh and Saknat Abu Kebir quarters.
1938Apr 20San Francisco’s Joe DiMaggio ended his holdout with Colonel Jacob Rupert, owner of the NY Yankees, and accepted an annual salary of $25,000. DiMaggio had asked for $40,000.
1939Apr 20The Kehlsteinhous, aka the Eagle’s Nest, a mountaintop teahouse located in the Kehlstein mountains near Berchtesgaden, was given to Adolf Hitler as a 50th birthday present.
1940Apr 20RCA publicly demonstrated its new and powerful electron microscope in Philadelphia, Pa.
1941Apr 20Joni Evans, publisher of Simon & Schuster, Random House, was born in NYC.
1942Apr 20Pierre Laval, the premier of Vichy France, in a radio broadcast, established a policy of “true reconciliation with Germany.”
1945Apr 20US forces conquered Motobu peninsula on Okinawa.
1946Apr 201st baseball game telecast was in Chicago with the Cards vs. Cubs.
1948Apr 20United Auto Workers president Walter P. Reuther was shot and wounded at his home in Detroit.
1949Apr 20Jockey Bill Shoemaker won his 1st race, in Albany, California.
1951Apr 20Gen. MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress after being relieved by President Truman.
1953Apr 20Operation Little Switch began in Korea, the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners of war.
1958Apr 20The last Key System train left San Francisco for Oakland. Ferry service from the SF Ferry Building ended when the Southern Pacific “Eureka” made its last crossing to Oakland. Train tracks were taken off the lower deck of the Bay Bridge and the lanes were paved in for car traffic.
1959Apr 20British ballerina Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991)) was arrested and briefly detained in a Panama prison. She and her diplomat husband, Roberto Arias, had sought Fidel Castro’s help in a revolution that failed because of a last-minute blunder. Fonteyn, born Peggy Hookham, went on to reach even greater creative heights through her acclaimed partnership with Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev. She returned to Panama with her husband years later and died there
1961Apr 20American Harold Graham made 1st rocket belt flight.
1962Apr 20The Secret Army Organization (OAS) leader and ex-general Salan was arrested in Algiers.
1964Apr 20August Sander (b.1876), German photographer, died. He attempted to make a complete portrait survey of 20th century German society. His “Face of Our Time,” a volume of 60 photographs, was published in 1929.
1967Apr 20U.S. planes bombed Haiphong for first time during the Vietnam War.
1968Apr 20Pierre Elliott Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister of Canada. He succeeded Lester B. Pierson.
1970Apr 20Paul Celan (49), Romania born poet, drowned himself in the Seine. English translations of his poems were published in 2001.
1971Apr 20The US Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools. The ruling allowed Charlotte, NC., and other cities nationwide to use mandatory busing and student assignment based on race to attempt to further integrate schools. The case arose in 1965 when a black parent, James E. Swann, challenged the system that kept Charlotte’s black students apart from the white majority. In 2001 an appeals court ruled that the dual school system was dismantled and busing could end. A failed appeal to the Supreme Court ended the case in 2002.
1972Apr 20The manned lunar module from Apollo 16 landed on the moon.
1977Apr 20The US Supreme Court, in Wooley v. Maynard, said car owners could refuse to display state mottoes on license plates. The Court ruled that “Live Free or Die” may be covered on NH license plates.
1978Apr 20A South Korean Air Lines Boeing 707 crash-landed in northwestern Russia. Flight 902 was fired on by a Soviet interceptor after entering Soviet airspace. 107 passengers and crew survived after the plane made an emergency landing on a frozen lake and 2 passengers were killed.
1979Apr 20Howard K. Smith (d.2002) resigned as news analyst for ABC over the curtailment of his commentary.
1980Apr 20The first Cubans sailing to the United States as part of the massive Mariel boatlift reached Florida.
1981Apr 20The final performance of TV show “Soap” aired.
1983Apr 20Pres. Reagan signed a $165B bail out for Social Security.
1984Apr 20Julie Connell (18), a senior at Arroyo High School, disappeared in Hayward. Her body was found 5 days later in Palomares Canyon near Castro Valley. In 2000 DNA evidence revealed that Robert Rhoades (47), a Yuba City man on death row, had kidnapped, raped and stabbed her to death.
1986Apr 20The Atlas Star, a double-decker ferry, sank in stormy weather in Bangladesh. 500 passengers were feared drowned.
1987Apr 20The United States deported Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union, where he had been convicted in absentia of Nazi war crimes and faced a death sentence. Linnas, who maintained his innocence, died of heart disease in Leningrad the following July.
1988Apr 20The US Senate passed the Civil Liberties Act, a measure providing $20,000 payments to Japanese-Americans interned by the US government during World War II. Pres. Reagan signed it on Aug 10.
1989Apr 20Ramon Salcido, a California winery worker later convicted of killing six relatives and a co-worker, was deported from Mexico to the U.S.
1990Apr 20Former junk bond financier Michael Milken agreed to plead guilty to six felonies and pay $600 million in penalties to settle the largest securities fraud case in history.
1991Apr 20US Marines landed in northern Iraq to begin building the first center for Kurdish refugees on Iraqi territory. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander of Operation Desert Storm, left Saudi Arabia for home.
1992Apr 20Defending champion Ibrahim Hussein of Kenya became the sixth three-time winner of the Boston Marathon, while Russia’s Olga Markova won the women’s division.
1993Apr 20President Clinton said he accepted responsibility for the decision to try to end the 51-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Texas, yet laid “ultimate responsibility” on David Koresh for the deaths that resulted.
1994Apr 20Israeli and PLO negotiators wrapped up an agreement transferring civilian government powers to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
1995Apr 20In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI announced it was looking for two men suspected of renting the truck used to carry the explosive; rescue teams suspended the search for survivors so that the remaining structure of the Alfred P. Murrah Building could be shored up.
1996Apr 20Russia and the leaders of the world’s seven richest democracies agreed in Moscow to end nuclear tests by the fall and pledged new steps to keep nuclear materials out of the wrong hands.
1997Apr 20In Atlanta, Ga., Timmie Sinclair (27) was beaten by police officers in a scene that was captured on videotape and showed excessive use of force and baton beating.
1998Apr 20In an unusual use of a racketeering law designed to fight the mob, a federal jury in Chicago ruled that anti-abortion protest organizers had used threats and violence to shut down clinics. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in February 2003 that federal racketeering and extortion laws were wrongly used to try to stop blockades, harassment and violent protests outside clinics.
1999Apr 20Jay Scott Ballinger (36), arrested in Feb., was indicted on charges of burning 10 churches in Indiana and Georgia.
2000Apr 20Littleton, Colorado, paused to remember the victims on the first anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.
2001Apr 20Yasser Arafat proposed that he and Ariel Sharon simultaneously call for an end Israeli-Palestinian violence.
2002Apr 20Representatives of the Group of Seven countries, meeting in Washington, agreed to intensify efforts to combat terrorist financing and also adopted a plan to better deal with international debt crises.
2003Apr 20An Australian navy vessel boarded a North Korean ship off Sydney and charged it with involvement in a $48 million heroin shipment to Victoria.
2004Apr 20The US Labor Dept. established new rules on overtime pay. It expanded the range for lower income workers and put a ceiling on overtime for higher income workers.
2005Apr 20Pres. Bush signed new legislation to make individual bankruptcy more difficult
2006Apr 20Pres. Bush welcomed Chinese President Hu Jintao to the White House as the two leaders embarked on talks aimed at cooling tensions over a yawning US-China trade gap. Bush urged Hui Jintao to make trade concessions, improve human rights and exert more influence over North Korea. The 2 leaders broke no new ground on sensitive issues.
2007Apr 20Vermont senators voted to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have raised “serious questions of constitutionality.”
2008Apr 20Pope Benedict XVI held a Mass at Yankee Stadium on his last day in the US.
2009Apr 20President Barack Obama convened his first formal Cabinet meeting and asked department and agency chiefs to look for ways over the next 90 days to cut $100 million out of the federal budget.
2010Apr 20The space shuttle Discovery landed in Florida ending its 15-day voyage to the int’l. space station.
2011Apr 20US officials said the Obama administration plans to give the Libyan opposition $25 million in non-lethal assistance in what will be the first direct US aid to the rebels after weeks of assessing their capabilities and intentions.
2012Apr 20Pres. Obama declared some 14,000 acres of California’s Fort Ord a national monument under the 1906 Antiquities Act.
2013Apr 20In San Francisco some 10-15 thousand people gathered at Golden Gate Park’s Hippie Hill for the annual “420″ unofficial pot-smoking bacchanalia. They left some 10,000 pounds of garbage for cleanup.
2014Apr 20In Colorado tens of thousands gathered to celebrate the first legal 4:20, the April 20 pot holiday, at Denver’s Civic Center Park.
    Source: Timelines of History 

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