Today:
1564: William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
1607: The first permanent English settlers in North America made landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia, before establishing the Jamestown colony.
1777: Sybil Ludington rode through the night in New York to warn American colonial forces of approaching British troops.
1803: Thousands of meteorite fragments fell in L’Aigle, France, an event that helped confirm the existence of meteorites to the scientific community.
1865: John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was shot and killed by federal troops in Virginia.
1933: The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, was established by Hermann Göring.
1937: German and Italian warplanes bombed the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
1954: The first clinical trials of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine began in Fairfax County, Virginia.
1986: A catastrophic explosion occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
2005: Syria ended its 29-year military occupation of Lebanon, withdrawing its remaining troops.