This Day In History

[Dapper Gent]

April 8th:
1974: Hank Aaron hits 715th home run breaking Babe Ruth's record. (No steroids needed)
1975: Frank Robinson of the Cleveland Indians became first black manager of a major league baseball team.

 

[Dapper Gent]

April 9th:
1912: First exhibition baseball game played in Fenway Park (Sox vs Harvard).
1941: PGA establishes the Golf Hall of Fame.
1950: Bob Hope makes his first TV appearance.
1962: Arnold Palmer wins his 3rd (of 4) Masters.
1971: Ringo Starr releases "It don't come easy".

 

[Dapper Gent]

April 10, 1912:
RMS Titanic sets sail from Southampton UK for her maiden (and final) voyage.

 

[enrywivanh]

17 April 1860 - Boxings first world title fight.
Tom Sayers, England, fought John C Heenan, U.S.A., bare knuckles, at Farnborough, Hampshire, England.
The fight was broken up by the police and declared a draw after 42 rounds, 2 hours 20 minutes.

 

[Mr. Scruffy]

April 19

1775 - At about 5 a.m., 700 British troops, on a mission to capture Patriot leaders and seize a Patriot arsenal, march into Lexington to find 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the town’s common green. British Major John Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered Patriots to disperse, and after a moment’s hesitation the Americans began to drift off the green. Suddenly, a shot was fired from an undetermined gun, and a cloud of musket smoke soon covered the green. When the brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Americans lay dead or dying and 10 others were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but the American Revolution had begun.

1943 - In Warsaw, Poland, Nazi forces attempting to clear out the city’s Jewish ghetto are met by gunfire from Jewish resistance fighters, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins. Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler announced that the ghetto was to be emptied of its residents in honor of Hitler’s birthday the following day, and more than 1,000 S.S. soldiers entered the confines with tanks and heavy artillery. Thousands were slaughtered as the Germans systematically progressed down the ghettos, blowing up the buildings one by one. Virtually all those who survived the Uprising were deported to Treblinka and were dead by the end of the war.

1993 - At Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launches a tear-gas assault on the Branch Davidian compound, ending a tense 51-day standoff between the federal government and an armed religious cult. By the end of the day, the compound was burned to the ground, and some 80 Branch Davidians, including 22 children, had perished in the inferno.

1995 - Just after 9 a.m., a massive truck bomb explodes outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The blast collapsed the north face of the nine-story building, instantly killing more than 100 people and trapping dozens more in the rubble. Emergency crews raced to Oklahoma City from across the country, and when the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later the death toll stood at 168 people killed, including 19 young children who were in the building’s day-care center at the time of the blast.

 

[Mr. Scruffy]

June 21

1788 - New Hampshire becomes the ninth and last necessary state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, thereby making the document the law of the land.

 

[Dapper Gent]

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon after reaching the surface in their Apollo 11 lunar module.