Born to an unmarried notary and a peasant woman, Leonardo received no formal classical education, apprenticing instead as a painter in Florence. He would go on to paint the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper while filling notebooks with anatomical studies, flying-machine sketches, and engineering designs centuries ahead of their time. His restless curiosity made him the archetype of the Renaissance man.
Shot in the back of the head the previous evening while watching a play at Ford's Theatre, Lincoln never regained consciousness. He died in a boarding house across the street, surrounded by cabinet members and his son Robert. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton reportedly said, 'Now he belongs to the ages.' Lincoln's death, just five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, plunged a nation on the cusp of peace into fresh grief and complicated Reconstruction.
As the Scramble for Africa intensified in the years after the Berlin Conference, European powers negotiated a thicket of bilateral treaties to divide territory without going to war with each other. This convention fixed boundaries between French and British claims, borders that, largely unaltered, became the modern frontiers separating countries such as Nigeria, Niger, and neighboring francophone states.
The 'unsinkable' Titanic, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, struck an iceberg just before midnight on April 14 and slipped beneath the waves at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912. Lifeboats launched at half capacity, and the ship carried lifebelts but not enough boats for everyone aboard. The disaster reshaped maritime law, mandating adequate lifeboats and 24-hour radio watch on passenger ships.
Signed by Dodgers executive Branch Rickey and groomed through a season in the minor leagues, Robinson endured death threats, hostile crowds, and even hostility from some teammates to break a color barrier that had held for sixty years. He went hitless in his debut against the Boston Braves but reached first on an error and later scored, a quiet start to a season that ended with him winning the inaugural Rookie of the Year award.
Registered as 'K.V. Switzer' to obscure her gender, Switzer ran with official bib number 261. Race co-director Jock Semple tried to tear off her bib mid-race, but her boyfriend, a hammer thrower, shoved him aside, and Switzer finished in roughly four hours and twenty minutes. The photographs of the confrontation became a landmark image in the fight for women's equality in sports; women were not officially allowed to enter Boston until 1972.
Following the April 13 explosion that crippled the Odyssey command module, the crew of Apollo 13 sheltered in the lunar module 'Aquarius' as a lifeboat. On April 15, they performed a crucial engine burn behind the Moon to correct their trajectory and speed the return to Earth, buying time and fuel margins for a mission that had turned from moon landing to survival operation.
Vietnam's invasion had already ousted the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh in January 1979, but by mid-April remnants of Pol Pot's forces were being pushed into jungle strongholds near Thailand, ending the Khmer Rouge's nearly four-year rule that killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians through execution, forced labor, and starvation. The regime would wage a guerrilla insurgency from the border region for another decade.
After nearly eight years of negotiation under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, ministers gathered in Marrakesh to sign an accord creating a permanent institution to police global trade rules, resolve disputes, and slash tariffs worldwide. The WTO formally began operations on January 1, 1995, replacing the more ad hoc GATT framework that had governed trade since 1947.
By mid-April 1994, the genocide launched after President Habyarimana's assassination on April 6 was killing thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians daily across Rwanda, with machete-wielding militias operating through roadblocks nationwide. International peacekeepers, hampered by a limited UN mandate, largely could not intervene, and the death toll during this period climbed toward what would total roughly 800,000 by July.
By mid-April 1997, Apple's stock had cratered and CEO Gil Amelio's turnaround efforts were failing, setting the stage for Steve Jobs's return later that year following Apple's acquisition of NeXT. The company's near-death spiral in this period set up one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds in business history.
Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonated homemade bombs twelve seconds and 210 yards apart near the marathon's finish on Boylston Street, killing 8-year-old Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, and Lingzi Lu. A massive manhunt followed, locking down Boston and culminating in Tamerlan's death in a shootout and Dzhokhar's capture hiding in a backyard boat four days later.