SomeFacts | April 26

On this day - April 26

1336 — Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ascends Mont Ventoux.

1478 — The Pazzi family attack on Lorenzo de' Medici in order to ...

1564 — Playwright William Shakespeare is baptized in ...

1607 — The Virginia Company colonists make landfall at Cape Henry.

1721 — A massive earthquake devastates the Iranian city of Tabriz.

1777 — Sybil Ludington, aged 16, allegedly rode 40 miles (64 km) to ...

1794 — Battle of Beaumont during the Flanders Campaign of the War of ...

1802 — Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but ...

1803 — Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of ...

1805 — First Barbary War: United States Marines captured Derne under ...

1865 — Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes ...

1900 — Fires destroy Canadian cities Ottawa and Hull, reducing them ...

1903 — Atlético Madrid Association football club is founded.

1915 — World War I: Italy secretly signs the Treaty of London ...

1916 — Easter Rising: Battle of Mount Street Bridge.

1920 — Ice hockey makes its Olympic debut at the Antwerp Games with ...

1923 — The Duke of York weds Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at Westminster ...

1925 — Paul von Hindenburg defeats Wilhelm Marx in the second round ...

1933 — The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, ...

1937 — Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain, is bombed by the German ...

1942 — Benxihu Colliery accident in Manchukuo leaves 1,549 Chinese ...

1943 — The Easter Riots break out in Uppsala, Sweden.

1944 — Heinrich Kreipe is captured by Allied commandos in occupied ...

1944 — Georgios Papandreou becomes head of the Greek ...

1945 — World War II: Filipino troops of the 66th Infantry Regiment, ...

1945 — World War II: Battle of Bautzen: Last successful German ...

1954 — The first clinical trials of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine ...

1954 — The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina ...

1956 — SS Ideal X, the world's first successful container ship, ...

1958 — Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue ...

1960 — Forced out by the April Revolution, President of South Korea ...

1962 — The British space programme launches its first satellite, the ...

1962 — NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.

1963 — In Libya, amendments to the constitution transform Libya ...

1964 — Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form the United Republic of ...

1966 — A new government is formed in the Republic of the Congo, led ...

1966 — The magnitude 5.1 Tashkent earthquake affects the largest city ...

1970 — The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property ...

1981 — Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San ...

1986 — The Chernobyl disaster occurs in the Ukrainian Soviet ...

1989 — People's Daily publishes the April 26 Editorial which ...

1989 — The deadliest known tornado strikes Central Bangladesh, ...

1991 — Fifty-five tornadoes break out in the central United States. ...

1993 — The Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on mission STS-55 to ...

1994 — South Africa begins its first multiracial election, which is ...

1994 — China Airlines Flight 140 crashes at Nagoya Airport in Japan, ...

1999 — Outbreak of CIH computer virus.

2002 — Robert Steinhäuser kills 16 at Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt, ...

2005 — Cedar Revolution: Under international pressure, Syria ...

2015 — Nursultan Nazarbayev is re-elected President of Kazakhstan ...

2025 — A car ramming attack at a Lapu-Lapu Day festival kills 11 ...