1564 ~ Birthday of William Shakespeare, Playwright.

1858 ~ Birthday of Max Planck, Physicist. Awarded the Nobel Prize in physics 1918.

1891 ~ Birthday of Sergei Prokofiev, Soviet Composer.

1954 ~ Hank Aaron hit his first major league home run.

1968 ~ Birthday of Timothy McVeigh, American Terrorist.

1969 ~ Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death for assassinating Sen. Robert Kennedy.

1984 ~ American announcement of the isolation of the AIDS virus.

1985 ~ Coca-Cola changed its formula and released New Coke.

2004 ~ President Bush eased Reagan-era sanctions against Libya in return for Moammar Gadhafi's giving up weapons of mass destruction.

2007 ~ Death of Boris Yeltsin, Soviet strongman and the architect of the dismantling of the USSR.

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1731 ~ Death of Daniel Defoe, English Writer.

1898 ~ Spain declared war on the U.S. over Cuba.

1905 ~ Birthday of Robert Penn Warren, Writer, Pulitzer Prize winner, first American Poet Laureate.

1916 ~ The Easter uprising began when some 1,600 Irish nationalists seized several key sites in Dublin.

1942 ~ Birthday of Barbra Streisand, American Singer & Actress.

1967 ~ Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died in Soyuz 1.

1986 ~ Death of Wallis Simpson, Mistress & Wife of The Duke of Windsor.

1990 ~ The Hubble Space Telescope was launched by Space Shuttle Discovery.

1996 ~ The main assembly of the Palestine Liberation Organization voted to revoke clauses in its charter that called for an armed struggle to destroy Israel.

1997 ~ Death of Pat Paulsen, American comedian and politician.

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1967 ~ Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died in Soyuz 1.

There is a story, possibly true, I heard of a young man about an amateur radio buff who picked up and recorded a signal. It was later identified as the heartbeats of a dying man. Propaganda, or some poor bastard dying a lonely death?

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Robert Heinlein may have written about it in his article Pravda means 'Truth', that while traveling in Vilnius, in the USSR, he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a man into orbit that day, but that later the same day their claim was denied.

I suspect that the facts would have been uncovered and published sometime during or following the downfall of the Soviet Union, as has the Katyn Massacre.

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For the sake of the poor cosmonaut, I'm hoping it was Yankee propaganda.

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1792 ~ The French national anthem, “La Marseillaise” was composed.

1840 ~ Birthday of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Composer.

1900 ~ Birthday of Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1945.

1906 ~ Birthday of William J. Brennan, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice.

1915 ~ Allied soldiers invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the Ottoman Turkish Empire from WWI.

1917 ~ Birthday of Ella Fitzgerald, Jazz Singer.

1945 ~ The United Nations was organized in San Francisco, California, by 50 nations.

1953 ~ Francis Crick and James Watson published MOLECULAR STRUCTURE OF NUCLEIC ACIDS: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid describing the double helix structure of DNA.

1980 ~ Tehran hostage rescue mission failed.

1983 ~ Pioneer 10 passed beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Feastdays & Holidays

Australia, New Zealand ~ ANZAC Day

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1711 ~ Birthday of David Hume, Philosopher & Historian.

1785 ~ Birthday of John Audubon, Naturalist & Illustrator.

1935 ~ Birthday of Carol Burnett, Singer, Actress & Comedienne.

1937 ~ Planes from the Condor Legion, an adjunct of the Luftwaffe, bombed the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

1945 ~ The Battle of Bautzen: The last successful German armoured offensive of WWII.

1964 ~ Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.

1986 ~ The world's worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union.

1989 ~ Death of Lucille Ball, Actress & Comedienne.

1994 ~ South Africa held its first multiracial elections.

2005 ~ Syria's 29-year military presence in Lebanon ended.

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"1937 ~ Planes from the Condor Legion, an adjunct of the Luftwaffe, bombed the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War."

Germany's version of the Eagle Squadrons. What is it about birds of prey?

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1521 ~ Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philippines.

1667 ~ John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10.

1791 ~ Birthday of Samuel Morse, inventor of Morse code.

1813 ~ U.S. troops captured York (present day Toronto), the capital of Ontario.

1822 ~ Birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, 18th U.S. President.

1891 ~ Birthdayof Sergei Prokofiev, Soviet composer.

1904 ~ The Australian Labor Party became the first such party to gain national government, under Chris Watson.

1945 ~ Soviet and American armies linked up at the Elbe.

1999 ~ Death of Al Hirt, Musician.

2007 ~ Death of Mstislav Rostropovich, Russian cellist and conductor.

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1906 ~ Birthday of Kurt Gödel, mathematician.

1937 ~ Birthday of Saddam Hussein, former leader of Iraq.

1941 ~ Birthday of Ann-Margret, Swedish-born actress.

1945 ~ Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were killed by members of the Italian resistance movement while trying to flee Italy.

1947 ~ Thor Heyerdahl and five crewmates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki.

1952 ~ The U.S. occupation of Japan ended.

1969 ~ Charles de Gaulle resigned as President of France.

1977 ~ The Red Army Faction trial concluded. The defendants, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin & Jan-Carl Raspe were convicted.

2001 ~ Dennis Tito became the world's first space tourist.

2003 ~ Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store launched.

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1893 ~ Birthday of Harold Urey, American chemist, awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

1945 ~ Start of Operation Manna.

1945 ~ American soldiers liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

1951 ~ Death of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born philosopher.

1958 ~ The Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, opened in London.

1968 ~ Hair opened on Broadway.

1980 ~ Death of Alfred Hitchcock, director.

1992 ~ Rioting broke out in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating Rodney King.

1997 ~ The Chemical Weapons Convention, a worldwide treaty to ban chemical weapons, went into effect.

2008 ~ Death of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD.

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1877 ~ Birthday of Alice B. Toklas, Muse and Brownie Chef.

1916 ~ Birthday of Claude Shannon, the "father of information theory”.

1938 ~ Birthday of Larry Niven, Science Fiction author.

1945 ~ Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide after being married for one day.

1948 ~ The Land Rover was introduced.

1973 ~ President Nixon took responsibility for the Watergate scandal.

1975 ~ The South Vietnamese government in Saigon fell to Communist forces.

1980 ~ Accession of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

1993 ~ CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to everyone.

2009 ~ Chrysler automobile company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

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1840 ~ The Penny Black postage stamp put on sale in the UK.

1869 ~ The Folies Bergères opened in Paris. Edouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” recalls the lot of one of the employees.

1904 ~ Death of Antonín Dvořák, Czech Composer.

1941 ~ Orson Welles's Citizen Kane premiered in New York City.

1944 ~ Birthday of Rita Coolidge, Singer.

1960 ~ Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union.

1978 ~ Death of Aram Khachaturian, Armenian composer.

1982 ~ RAF aircraft attack two airstrips near Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands.

2004 ~ Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia join the European Union.

2008 ~ Death of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the "DC Madam".

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1729 ~ Birthday of Empress Catherine II of Russia.

1892 ~ Birthday of "The Red Baron", Manfred von Richthofen.

1933 ~ The first modern sighting of the Loch Ness monster was reported.

1945 ~ The Soviet Union announced the capture of Berlin.

1952 ~ The De Havilland Comet 1, the world's first jet airliner, launched the jet age.

1955 ~ Tennessee Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

1982 ~ The British submarine HMS Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano.

1997 ~ Tony Blair became Prime Minister of the UK.

1999 ~ Death of Oliver Reed, English actor.

2011 ~ Death of Osama bin Laden, by U.S. Special Forces.

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1982 ~ The British submarine HMS Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano.

She survived Pearl Harbour but couldn't survive the Brits.

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