April 26 - Events

Events

• 1336 – Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ascends Mont Ventoux
• 1478 – The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de' Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo of Florence.
• 1607 – English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
• 1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notoriousémigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliary gesture with the factions of theAncien Regime and to eventually consolidate his own rule.
• 1805 – United States Marines captured Derne, Tripoli under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon.
• 1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina.
• 1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, inVirginia.
• 1925 – Paul von Hindenburg defeats Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election to become the first directly elected head of state of the Weimar Republic.
• 1928 – Los Angeles City Hall dedicated.
• 1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
• 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica (or Gernika in Basque, Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.
• 1942 – The Benxihu Colliery accident occurs in Manchukuo : 1549 Chinese miners are dead.
• 1945 – World War II: Battle of Bautzen – last successful German tank-offensive of the war and last noteworthy victory of the Wehrmacht.
• 1954 – The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.
• 1956 – First container ship left Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas.
• 1958 – Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
• 1962 – NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
• 1963 – In Libya, amendments to the constitution transform Libya (United Kingdom of Libya) into one national unity (Kingdom of Libya) and allows for female participation in elections.
• 1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.
• 1965 – A Rolling Stones concert in London, Ontario is shut down by police after 15 minutes due to rioting.
• 1966 – An earthquake of magnitude 7.5 destroys Tashkent.
• 1966 – A new government is formed in the Republic of Congo, led by Ambroise Noumazalaye.
• 1970 – The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization enters into force
• 1982 – 57 people are killed by former police officer Woo Bum-kon in a shooting spree in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea.
• 1986 – A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world's worst nuclear disaster.
• 1989 – The deadliest tornado in world history strikes Central Bangladesh, killing upwards of 1,300, injuring 12,000, and leaving as many as 80,000 homeless.
• 1991 – Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado (see Andover, Kansas Tornado Outbreak).
• 1994 – China Airlines flight 140 crashes at Nagoya Airport in Japan, killing 264 of the 271 people on board.
• 1994 – Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.
• 2002 – Robert Steinhäuser infiltrates and kills 17 at Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.
• 2005 – Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country ( Syrian occupation of Lebanon ).