On April 29, 2015, Major League Baseball staged a spectacle unlike any it had seen before—or has seen since. Inside Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, two professional teams, the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox, went through the timeless motions of America’s…
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In the early hours of April 28, 1944, a training exercise off the southern coast of England turned into one of the deadliest friendly-fire-adjacent disasters of World War II, exposing vulnerabilities that would be quietly corrected before the Allied invasion of Normandy just weeks…
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On the night of April 28, 1881, one of the most legendary figures of the American West, Billy the Kid, staged his most daring feat: a violent and dramatic escape from the Lincoln County jail in Mesilla, New Mexico. Already infamous as an outlaw…
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On April 27, 1989, tens of thousands of students poured into the streets of Beijing in one of the most pivotal early moments of the protests that would come to define the spring of dissent in the People’s Republic of China. The demonstrations, organized…
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In April 1953, as aerial battles continued to rage fiercely over Korea, the United States military launched an ambitious psychological warfare campaign designed to destabilize enemy morale and gain a strategic intelligence advantage. This unusual operation, codenamed Operation Moolah, was aimed squarely at communist…
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On April 26, 1865, twelve days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Union cavalrymen cornered and killed his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, bringing a dramatic end to one of the most intense manhunts in American history. The confrontation unfolded in rural Virginia, at a…
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The morning of April 26, 1607, broke clear and bright over the Atlantic. After 144 days at sea, the weary passengers of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery caught sight of the low, sandy shore of what would become Virginia. With cautious excitement, they…
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In the early hours of April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear accident in history unfolded at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Reactor No. 4 exploded during a late-night safety test gone awry, releasing massive amounts of…
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On April 25, 1953, a short, understated paper appeared in the journal Nature under the title “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” Its authors, Francis Crick and James Watson, opened with a sentence that has since become one of…
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On April 25, 1901, New York became the first state in the United States to require license plates for automobiles—an unassuming administrative milestone that marked the beginning of a new era in transportation regulation. As motor vehicles began their ascent from elite novelty to…
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