Today in History.....

[jasknight12]

On 3 April 1882, American outlaw Jesse James is killed by Robert Ford at his home in St Joseph, Missouri.

Jesse James was a famous American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla, and leader of the James–Younger Gang. He has been memorialised by American folk tales and folk music.

 

[aram]

martin luther king

 

[jasknight12]

On 4 April 1975, Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.

 

[jasknight12]

Modern rock icon and Nirvana front-man, Kurt Cobain, commits suicide on 5 April 1994. His body was discovered inside his home in Seattle, Washington, three days later by an electrician, who was installing a security system there.

Kurt Cobain is still instantly recognisable as one of the most iconic faces of the 1990s, and the most important musician of the grunge scene.

 

[jasknight12]

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical masterpiece South Pacific opens on Broadway on April 7, 1949, at the Majestic Theatre.

It was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Michener's work that would be financially successful and, at the same time, send a strong progressive message on racism.

 

[jasknight12]

On 8 April 1983 in front of a live audience of 20 tourists, American magician and illusionist, David Copperfield, makes the Statue of Liberty disappear.

 

[jasknight12]

Marian Anderson was an African-American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. Music critic Alan Blyth said: "Her voice was a rich, vibrant contralto of intrinsic beauty."

Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall.

The incident placed Anderson into the spotlight of the international community on a level unusual for a classical musician. With the aid of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

She sang before a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions. Anderson continued to break barriers for black artists in the United States.

 

[jasknight12]

On 10 April 1970, Paul McCartney officially announces the split of The Beatles.

There were numerous causes for the Beatles' break-up. It was not a single event but rather a long transition, including the cessation of touring in 1966, and the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967. Both George Harrison and Ringo Starr temporarily left the group at various points during 1968–69 and all four band members had begun working on solo projects by 1970 as they all realised the likelihood the band would not regroup. Ultimately, animosity made it impossible for the group to continue working together in the years following.

 

[jasknight12]

On April 12 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space and the first person to orbit Earth, on the Vostok 1 spacecraft.

Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People of Earth, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!

 

[jasknight12]

Sack of Constantinople 13 April 1204

"There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade."

(So wrote the prominent medievalist Steven Runciman).

Constantinople was considered as a bastion of Christianity that defended Europe from the advancing forces of Islam, and the Fourth Crusade's sack of the city dealt an irreparable blow to this eastern bulwark. Although the Greeks retook Constantinople after 57 years of Latin rule, the Byzantine Empire had been crippled by the Fourth Crusade. Reduced to Constantinople, north-western Anatolia, and a portion of the southern Balkans, the empire fell to the Ottoman Turks who captured the city in 1453

Speros Vryonis in Byzantium and Europe gives a vivid account of the sack:

The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable. Constantinople had become a veritable museum of ancient and Byzantine art, an emporium of such incredible wealth that the Latins were astounded at the riches they found. Though the Venetians had an appreciation for the art which they discovered (they were themselves semi-Byzantines) and saved much of it, the French and others destroyed indiscriminately, halting to refresh themselves with wine, violation of nuns, and murder of Orthodox clerics. The Crusaders vented their hatred for the Greeks most spectacularly in the desecration of the greatest Church in Christendom. They smashed the silver iconostasis, the icons and the holy books of Hagia Sophia, and seated upon the patriarchal throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the Church's holy vessels. The estrangement of East and West, which had proceeded over the centuries, culminated in the horrible massacre that accompanied the conquest of Constantinople. The Greeks were convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin Christians. The defeat of Byzantium, already in a state of decline, accelerated political degeneration so that the Byzantines eventually became an easy prey to the Turks. The Fourth Crusade and the crusading movement generally thus resulted, ultimately, in the victory of Islam, a result which was of course the exact opposite of its original intention.

 

[trencherman]

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April 13, 1958 – In the midst of the Cold War, American pianist Van Cliburn (Harvey Lavan "Van" Cliburn Jr.), 23 achieved worldwide recognition when he won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

 

[jasknight12]

On 14 April 1865, US President Abraham Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater in Washington D.C.

 

[jasknight12]

RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of 15 April 1912, after colliding with an iceberg during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. There were an estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, and more than 1,500 died, making it one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history. RMS Titanic was the largest ship afloat at the time it entered service.

 

[haiducii]

On this day: 15th April

In 1968, a Slovenian TV-journal was sent into the airwaves for the first time; Marija Velkavrh and Vili Vodopivec were the announcers speaking from the TV Ljubljana studio. I should mention that the first TV Ljubljana studio measured meagre 50 square meters!

 

[topdog]

I can't let the Titanic anniversary pass without mentioning my favorite headline from the satirical newspaper The Onion, who put out a special 1912 edition in 1999.

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[jasknight12]

Marie Tussaud was 89 and one of the 19th century’s most successful career women when she died at her London home in Baker Street on 16 April 1850

Surviving a dangerous and singularly gruesome past, including almost being guillotined in the French Revolution, she had made herself a household name in her adopted country and Madame Tussaud's has remained one of Britain’s most popular tourist attractions to this day.

 

[jasknight12]

Bay Of Pigs invasion - 17 April 1961

A group of approximately 1,500 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA and financed by the Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations, launched an ill-fated invasion of Cuba from the sea in the Bay of Pigs.

The plan was to overthrow Fidel Castro and his revolution, with the assumption the Cuban population would rise up with the invaders.

Instead, it turned into a humiliating defeat for the USA and also pushed Cuba firmly into the arms of the Soviet Union.

The impact of the Bay of Pigs fiasco continues to this day. Historians believe it is—at least in part—responsible for the continuing estrangement of Cuba and the United States.

 

[jasknight12]

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on April 18 with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9.

Devastating fires soon broke out in the city and lasted for several days. As a result, up to 3,000 people died and over 80% of the city of San Francisco was destroyed.

The events are remembered as one of the worst and deadliest earthquakes in the history of the United States. The death toll remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history and high in the lists of American urban disasters.

 

[trencherman]

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on April 18 with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9.

Devastating fires soon broke out in the city and lasted for several days. As a result, up to 3,000 people died and over 80% of the city of San Francisco was destroyed.

The events are remembered as one of the worst and deadliest earthquakes in the history of the United States. The death toll remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history and high in the lists of American urban disasters.

A good narrative of the many characters caught in the drama of this historical disaster backed with lucid explanation of its geological basis is Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World.

 

[jasknight12]

American actress Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco on August 19, 1956.

Described as “the first modern event to generate media overkill,” the "wedding of the century" was estimated to have been watched by more than 30 million people.