April 26: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1607 - English colonists make landfall at Cape Henry,Virginia.
2. 1803 - Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L'Aigle, France; the event convinces European science that meteors exist.
3. 1865 - Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.
4. 1945 - World War II: Battle of Bautzen - last successful German tank-offensive of the war and last noteworthy victory of the Wehrmacht.
5. 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.
6. 1962 - NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
7. 1970 - The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization enters into force.
8. 1981 - Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center performs the world's first human open fetal surgery.
9. 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.
10. 1989 - People's Daily publishes the People's Daily editorial of April 26 which inflames the nascentTiananmen Square protests
11. Famous Birthdays: Eugène Delacroix (French painter), Frederick Law Olmsted (American journalist and landscape designer, co-designed Central Park), Owen Willans Richardson (English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate), Charles Francis Richter (American seismologist and physicist), Michael Smith (English-Canadian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate)

For famous birthdays and other daily events in history, visit our Daily Dose Activities.

Click Here for Yesterday in History: April 25

Click Here for Tomorrow in History: April 27

For more history resources on Internet 4 Classrooms, visit our Social Studies and History index. For Pre K-8th Grade Level History and Social Studies Resources, visit our Grade Level Index.