April 26 historic events
1607 English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
1785 Naturalist and artist John James Audubon was born in Haiti.
1805 United States Marines captured Derne, Tripoli under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon.
1865 Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.
Some conspiracy theorists claim that it wasn’t actually Booth who was killed.
1937 Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.
The Germans developed and refined the concept of terror from the air in this attack against Guernica’s civilians. The famous painting by Picasso immortalized the attack and the horror endured by its victims.
1938: Austrian Jews were required to register property above 5,000 Reichsmarks. This came as part of the Nazification of Austria after the Germans annexed Hitler’s homeland. After the war, the Austrians sought to portray themselves as the first victims of Nazi aggression. The cheering throngs that greeted Hitler told a different story.
(from “thisdayinjewishhistory”s blog)
1945 Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France’s Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
This WWI French hero was famous for his “They shall not pass” pledge, given while defending Verdun. He became a traitor after France’s defeat in WWII, collaborating with the nazis (ym”s) and heading the Vichy government. Petain died in prison in 1951.
1961 Roger Maris hits 1st of 61 homers in 1961.
Many baseball fans regard Maris’s 61 as the “real” (untainted by steroid cheating) home run record.
1970 The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization enters into force.
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. An explosion and fire in the No. 4 reactor sent radioactivity into the atmosphere; at least 31 people died immediately.
Believe it or not, this disaster was caused by a horribly mismanaged safety test and drill.
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.
1994 Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.
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.
Instead, Lebanon is now dominated by the Syrian / Iranian proxy Hezbollah.